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Hello, we're going to take you on another one of our winter walks,

the series that we've begun on the program marking autumn, turning to winter

and asking writers and poets to tell us what sights and sounds are meaningful to them at this time of year.

The latest is from the novelist Kate Moss in West Sussex.

I grew up in Fishbourne, a mile or so outside Judgeshire, in the 1960s and 70s, crossing the main road by the Bullshead, heading down Mill Lane, past pendrils with its thatched cottage roof, to the duck pond, where many generations of Wellington

boots came to the same sticky end. Salt Mill House sat and still sits on the edge of the water

meadows looking out over the silent expanse of sea like a sentinel. In the middle of the channel,

the ruins of Fire Hills Mill are exposed at each low tide.

To the east, the spire of Chichester Cathedral dominating the landscape.

To the west, the sailing villages of Bosom, Chidham and Cobner, and further still the naval heritage of the great cities of Portsmouth in Southampton. To the north,

the folds of the downs, the remains of an Iron Age fort on the trundle and the endless Sussex

sky. To the south, the sea. Not the tourist sands of Boggner Regis or Bracklesham

Bay or the Witterings, but the scruffy tidal estuary of fishbourne marshes.

Chill autumn days, the air heavy with the smell of bonfires and dusk, the damp mulch of leaves underfoot.

Sharp winter afternoons, the sky larren purple and grey above the Sussex Downs towards Goodwood and East Dean,

gulls wheeling out at sea and the hawthorn and blackthorn bushes stark and bear.

In the spring there will be pinpricks of colour as the first wildflowers show their colours in blossoms of yellow and pink.

But in winter it's a world of brown and white and grey.

The hush stillness of the reed mace that tower over your head, the stalks rattling like bones.

Damped December days sharp with ice, blustery January mornings and dispiriting February afternoons

when the sky and the sea meet.

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