On Black Hill

Between the rains, the floods and the frosts we had one beautiful day a couple of weeks ago and Millie and I drove up to Black Hill, just above Valley’s End. The Hill itself is nothing much, the usual Forestry Commission plantations of conifers, inhabited only by birds and animals, and otherwise used only by walkers, with or without dogs. On its lower slopes,  farmers in flat caps, on ancient tractors, round up sheep and till their fields. It is a very old landscape, hardly changed over the centuries, with stone-age burial mounds dotted about.

This is the landscape where the novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote the first chapters of his book On the Black Hill, a tale about twin brothers, living and farming in the Welsh Marches. It is a wonderful novel, spanning eighty years of hard work and life in a small rural community, far removed from the wonders of towns and cities. On The Black Hill was Chatwin’s deepest and darkest book (he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for it in 1982), which was made into a film of the same name in 1987.  Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989.

Three Scots Pines guard a pre-historic burial mound.

Black Hill is surrounded by lonely fields which lose themselves into the blue distance.

This is my contribution to Our World Tuesday.

If you click on the link you will find wonderful entries from bloggers

from all over the world.