Fluorescent forest

Our daily walk has been from the village down into and through Crawfordsburn glen, which opens onto the beach on Belfast Lough, a wide bay that opens onto the Irish Sea. The walk begins high on the walls of the glen with a view down to the stream tumbling along its floor. Adorning the banks of the glen is a Pick Up Sticks of fallen trees covered in a lime-green moss that is so brilliant that it seems to glow. When the sun comes out, as it frequently has these past few days, there's a neon intensity to the color. The glen (pictured below) brings to mind David Hockney's fascination with the Yorkshire wolds.

And like any gorgeous landscape, it brings to mind poetry. For me, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Inversnaid:

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

3/22