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land plants to colonize the Earth. Ritchie told me that there had been
a landslip here ten years before: the thin soil had slid off a sheet of
polished rock. Now alder, sallow and birch had colonized the exposed
earth, and their roots were fingering across the stone, gathering soil,
stabilizing the slope. He had planted an aspen on the edge of the slip:
it was suckering up around the rock. Its leaves, the shape of the domes
on a Russian Orthodox church, never quite still, shivered in the cool
bright light. Brown leathery flanges of cup fungus grew in the flushes
developing around the exposed stratum. Jays screeched among the
trees. They will become, if the land is defended from sheep for long
enough, one of the agents of reforestation. Jays can each bury
4,000 acorns every autumn, sometimes miles from where the mother
tree grows. While, astonishingly, they can remember where they put
every one, some of the birds will die in the winter, allowing the seeds
to germinate. 11
We crossed the fence again, and stepped up into the adjoining pas-
tures. Ritchie explained that the farmer had stopped running sheep
here, instead keeping horses on the land, which appeared to have been
left to go wild. He had found the skeleton of a foal in the grass: the
animals seemed to be looking after themselves. A few small rowans
had slowly begun to establish themselves on the hillside. Their silvery
trunks caught the light. We stood above the young wood in its early
autumn colours, looking down the valley whose bluffs interlocked
like the fingers of two hands, falling away to the estuary, beyond
which Snowdonia rose into that crystal day.
From behind us, like a dark bolt fired through the back of our
minds, a peregrine appeared, high against the wisps of cirrus. It swept
across the sky without moving its wings, in one smooth, swift glide
which seemed to follow the curve of the earth. It turned above the far
hill, whereupon a kestrel appeared, sliding down a column of air to
attack. With a flick of its wing, the larger falcon swung away, soon
diminishing to a speck high above the estuary.
The troop of tits caught up with us, moving through the tops of the
trees below our heads. They filled the wood with their noise, squeak-
ing and churring like an unoiled wheelbarrow. Where the horses had
skidded on the wet grass, scarring the pasture, hedge bedstraw and
wood sorrel grew, relics of some ancient woodland edge. We could see
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