The cusp of night, the cusp of the season, the softly intoxicating beauty of autumn nightfall…
Monday 21st September 2026
Walk start time: 6.45pm
Walk finish time: 7.32pm
Walk area: Gelliwion mountain edge track
Miles walked: 1.3
I have chosen a liminal time of day for a liminal time of year – stepping out into the crossroads of an evening, and of a season.
The deep blue skies are clear but darkening, a soft beckon, a gentle thrall – the energy of day, and of summer – meeting the darker enigma of autumn.
I seek to pause, to absorb, to let nature’s breath back into my hungry senses.
The heatwave summer has diminished my outside time- my therapy– my connection. I feel the month slipping away – feel the season turning before my body has had chance to catch up.
I need to redress the balance – let the outdoor world back into my bones.
I have perhaps 30 minutes before sunset, and a stunningly clear evening with an indigo sky opens before me as I ascend Gelliwion Road.
In the dusklight, the hedgerow of tumbling hazels and wild roses is filled with vibrant jewels of colour.
Guelder berries, rose-hips and holly, competing for the crown in crimson array.
Beside me, above the hillside of the Graig, a bright half moon balances in blue sky as shadow creeps up the mountain- a bridge between day and night.
I stop at the wooden gate onto the field, breathing in the scents of greenery -still warm from the day – as I feel the air cooling against my skin.
The mountains and valley before me are breathtaking.
For me, the sweeping majesty of the mountain in dusk sunlight is intensified by the clustered terraced houses, ordinary homes and real lives nestled into the crook of the valley.
It’s also a rare view that isn’t improved by a handful of indifferent sheep.
I continue to climb the hill at a steady pace, gently breathless from my unweathered muscles, which need to catch up with the seasons.
Towards the estate at the top, where the Pontypridd circular takes you either through the woodlands to Shoni’s pond, or onto a track to the edge of Mynydd Gelliwion, I pause and look around me.
When you walk regularly – familiar routes and places take on meanings and images that stretch beyond the present time.
Places where I have stopped, acutely observed, noticed, or photographed something, often stay in my head like visual snapshots I can flick through. Nature encounters even more so.
Where I stand now, I spent a happy ten minutes in winter watching an extremely comical blackbird having a feast on fallen apples. (Into the frosty wonderland – A Winter Walking Diary )
I realise that these images – layers of time – re-enforce and strengthen our relationship with place.
We have not just the unique experience of our visit that day – the feel of a place – its sights, sounds and smells, but the layered memories and images of our past relationship with it to ground and deepen our connection.
This evening, there are no apples or blackbirds, so I study the trees around me, the deep green oak leaves against the sky, and notice the tiny brown layered buds, congregating as if ready for a meeting in the safe recesses of the branches.
I learn that they are winter buds, sheltering little cocoons containing new leaves – biding their time for the next seasonal bridge into spring.
Nearby, tree stumps are a reminder of our official entry into mushroom season, the magical and often wonderfully ridiculous world of fungi, a brilliant nature find and focus as the wildflowers diminish.
As I step onto the track behind the houses, road noise diminishes, replaced by the soft crunch of my footsteps on gravel, and the various calls and twitters of birds settling down to roost.
On one side of me tangled thickets of woodland and understorey stretch away up the mountain, on the other, a tall hedgerow from which tiny birds flit in secretive haste.
Beyond the hedgerow, a sky tinged with burnt caramel and pink beneath the blue, and the elongating shadows of the mountains.
The left side of the path is now flanked with tall firs, their resinous scent lending fresh pungency to the still air. On the other side, as the horizon darkens further, a solitary flower reflects the half light with ethereal brilliance.
The birds are quieting, the furtive movements of the hedgerow lessening, and the first dry leaves of autumn lie still on the pathway.
People sometimes feel that autumn brings sadness, cessation of life and of colour. A time of shedding, withdrawal – and loss.
I don’t feel a cessation of life. A slowing, yes, but not a waning. What I sense in the quiet lane around me – as day turns to night, as summer to autumn – is not so much an ebbing, as a folding inwards.
Nature’s power doesn’t weaken and disperse as the equinox passes, it coils its way deep into the earth, into the trees – a concentrated force of regeneration.
The earth beneath our feet is re-fertilised -strengthened -for future emergence, and it thrums with life deep within, regardless of the season.
The quality of the light at this time of year is golden, soft, unique – inviting us to warm retreat.(See also The Magical light of equinox – An Autumn Walking Diary)
I trudge past the last cottage, and up a steep incline bordered by magnificent mature oaks. This brings me to a favourite vantage point, where the farm track meets the cross path to the mountain, and where a vista filled with green mountain and sky opens before me.
The last rays of the sun are turning faint wisps of cloud opalescent, and the deep shade of the wooded valley – its shapes and lines blurring in the lower light – feels cosy, and bedded down, yet wild and unfamiliar.
I breathe in the landscape, the soft-life filled air, the night.
Pausing at this brink of a place, at this brink of a season- I feel the subtle shift within me.
Like a cog set back in a wheel, or a flow of water returning to its natural course, I am no longer separate, I am within nature.
I walk down the track feeling encircled by the great boughs of the oaks. Their warm safety and their night -time mystery cannot be separated, nor should they be.
I am part of, and infinitely connected to the wildness of this equinox dusk.
The light drops with me as I walk, descending the pathway, the air filling with the earthy scents of night – a heady fizz, that vibrates in my veins.
On the last stretch towards town, lamplights are starting to flick on, and the mountain and horizon are streaked in a deep violet haze.
The branches and grasses around me are black silhouettes, and a now risen moon hangs like an equinox beacon over twilight fields.
I think about the stresses of the past months, both to myself and to nature, about our very human tendency to seek quick solace or oblivion in foods or drinks that quiet the senses but do little to nourish the soul.
Nature’s medicine, by contrast, is simple but indescribably complex. It is subtle, but powerful – gentle, but whole.
If nature were consumed as victuals I think – she would be served in a goblet of fine carved stone, light as a feather, and burnished in solid sunlight.
And you would never need more than one cupful…
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