After a year of weather extremes, autumn creeps along the slopes of Rivington Pike
The early morning sun today was like a pink smudge in a Canalleto sky and the landscape around Rivington Pike is still lost in hazy greyness hours later.
There is real warmth now on the lower flanks of the hill above the Great House Barn, it’s maybe even 20 degrees. It’s cooler under the canopy of trees as we avoid the crowds on a less followed path into the wood and carve our way through swathes of Himalayan balsam.
Everything feels dried out after weeks without any real rain. The oak leaves have a distinctive rattle when the occasional breeze reaches into the wood, and the grass that has grown in the brighter patches of wood is white beneath our feet. You wonder how anything without diamond-cutting equipment could have penetrated the rock-hard earth but a determined mouse or vole has achieved the impossible and left a freshly dug hole – a perfect circle of darkness an inch or so wide – in a bare patch of ground to the side of the path.
Ahead the path is lined by towering holly bushes. Years of their fallen leaves have mixed with pine needles and lie deep on the narrowing path. They’ve changed colour, not just to a brown but to shades of burnished bronze and copper.
About us there’s a gentle hum of late season bees making the most of the warmth, a low note against the piercing but distant chainsaw somewhere higher up on the Pike. A pair of speckled wood butterflies dance across a patch of sunlight that has burst through the grey skies and tree canopy to illuminate a patch of ferns and the dangling seeds of sycamore preparing for their helicopter descent.
We head further up the wooded slopes of the hill to join the terraced walkways of the old Lever estate towards the ravine. There’s a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye. A wagtail probably, darting from the patch of water in one of the cascade pools.
The water levels in the cascade are low but there’s enough flow to produce a respectable babble and an accompaniment to the blackbirds and thrush singing, hidden, high in the trees above.
Weeks of dry weather have left their mark but Autumn has yet to really touch these woods.
Here and there isolated clumps of berries – blackberries, elderberries, sloes, haws, yew berries and rowan berries, bring colour and contrast to green foliage, mosses and ferns in different corners of the wood.
The chestnut trees on the edge of the pinetum are beginning to brown and in the ravine the odd birch leaves, like yellow postage stamps, are floating on the dark glass of the waterfall but still summer lingers.
READ MORE: Saving the terraced gardens at Rivington
A path on one of the higher terraces is marked as part of both the Lancashire Way and the West Pennine Way and is a good place to rest. On a clear day you’d be able to see over the trees and west for miles but the grey haze has never really shifted. There’s plenty to hear – the distant thrum of M61 traffic, the squeak of a gate opening and closing lower down on the path and the murmur of walkers talking somewhere nearby in the wood.
A birch tree branch overhangs the edge of the path. Its leaves are still green but tiny, almost microscopic, buds bearing next year’s growth are just emerging at the base of the stems. Autumn will come. And winter, and spring.
In the fields below the woods there’s the sound of a distressed buzzard, making rapid and frantic cries as he circles above the far side of the open meadow. We watch as we walk along the western edge of the wood, wondering about the calamity that must have occurred somewhere on the far side of the meadow that stretches between the watchers and the watched.
Something has changed by the time we reach the ruined footings of the South Lodge. The crying of the buzzard has stopped and the bird has gone from view. We look north from where a neatly stacked pile of concrete fence posts is gradually being overcome by moss and the detritus of autumns past but still no sign.
Emerging from the wood, we head down along the side of the silent field and thistledown-lined fences towards the Great House Barn.
Turning back to face the wooded terraces of Rivington, the indifferent grey sky has gone and a pall of black clouds is building from the east beyond the Pike and the tower that lies out of view. A ripple of wind from the rising breeze fills the trees lining the avenue down to the barn one by one – a Mexican wave greeting the motorists who have been tempted out by the warmth of an early autumn day and are now slowly filling the car park.
