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Here, at 900 feet, a few miles in from the Irish scene, from my desk I can see the gate into Kai Limekurt, the home field.

The gate is a threshold, a border between garden and grassland, between tame and wild,

between here where the hair lies still in its form, and the open land where it runs free.

Here where the birds come to feed, and out there were a red kite circles, eyeing the earth for carrion.

I crossed the field and paused to look into the pond, rain and flood-filled at the field's heart.

Dry throughout the hot dry summer, now it brims with the rains of autumn and ripples in the wind.

Over Kaiblaen-Kurt and through another gate, I enter the ride, a narrow length of grassland, which in 2020 we planted with a twin row of hornbeams.

By now it's the isle of a tree cathedral, the 24 trees touching overhead. The grass is gold

with their fallen leaves. I walk on through Kaibach, the little field, past a stand of large

trees and on towards Vronvelin, the yellow slope named for its cover of gorse gold in summer

and scented like coconut. It falls steeply done to the summery, Welsh for a froth on milk or water.

A word brought into English in Shakespeare's day as flummery. Indeed, the stream is a

glittering froth. As always, a scatter of flowers gleam on the gorse. As the saying goes,

if gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion.

On across Kaidelen, the field shaped like a harp, and the view opens over miles of fields and woodland to the far blue line of Lansluni mountain.

I walk the track between the gorse as far as the oak wood, a hectare of sessile oaks, which every spring stand in a flood of bluebells. Below the track, the land slopes

steeply down to a tree-lined lane. On the far side of the lane lies a stretch of ancient,

undisturbed bogland, a horse, a special nature reserve. At its heart is a pool

reflecting the sky, a pingo hole, a remnant of the last ice age, one of many, but the rest collapsed as the ice melted.

From the bank that edges the oak wood, I try to imagine it, as when as a child I lay in the dark and thought of forever and ever, words to keep me awake.

It's just a track, half a mile from here to there, from the gate in the field to the oak wood,

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