As seen in the October 2017 issue of Dalesman magazine.

On this late October evening the Glen beckons, for after many pilgrimages to its heights I know some of the delights that await me up there. This is the time of year when I most want to walk; when wanderlust is eloquent and insistent indoors and the autumn itch to pitch into the changing world of dapple-hue is unresolvable until treading through – and smelling – rich leaf-mould.

I set out into a golden, wind-buffed dusk, which is arriving almost imperceptibly earlier than those of the preceding week: this hasty drawing on of the setting sun a signal that the year is preparing to clamber back into its gilding husk, to out-winter coming weathers. Not yet, I appeal with my footstep. I feel the merest nip of chill in the air at the end of my nose and in the tips of my fingers as I plot my course through the same-yet-not-same Saltaire village streets. The paving slabs are wet with dews – step-slicking – and, with the underbelly of the sky burnishing before my eyes, I fold myself into the nap of the wind and walk up through the wood’s unburdening of itself. Under oaks wrack-bent and twist-thrown, their leaves on the burn from yellow to auburn, the setting sun lights – there! – a strike as of a match, and sets the forest floor to fire. I scoop-gather some beech leaves as I go in bright but not yet brittled sheaves turned from green to red-gold.

Emerging from under the trees out onto the Shipley prairie of grasses, bracken and old ragged ragwort, I farewell my warbler companion who has followed my steps, always invisible in the depths of the trees, with his ooo-weet! ooo-weet! My steps plant golden into the old-grass ground and I catch my first sight of the dark monumental rocks laid down all-accidental-like in the thousands-of-years-ago glaciation. Rocks which up-rear themselves and fit the land between them, then fall off sharply, lipping the wooded ravine with their precarious-seeming precipices. Like the rocks, autumn up here is crisp and elemental: the wind flays the turf skins between and over the erratics in suck-cheeked frenzies, creating lips of grass that are trip-trickery to a walker’s boot. The bracken, bled of its summer green, is a brittle untidiness of antique rust, an ochre-brindled crust upon the earth. I have anticipated the desiccation of the bracken since walking the summer path between them, metres high, in arm-hoisted surrenders.

All recalls summer; all looks on to winter. Autumn mixes a little of both in its strange alchemy. Scuff-footed, I walk these ancient stones towards the horizon, the sinking sun striking the clouds with fire behind me. My eye is drawn up high to a banking flock of birds – too high to tell what they are – but perhaps some of the number who leave us to our winter devices each year in elective desertions for warmer, more abundant climes. As my eyes complete their circuit, a sudden start caused by my step from grass to stone draws my gaze towards the fading heather. A shadow enlarged by the low-setting sun. Can it be? It is. A hare. A creature made to stand and stare at; all its energy gathered into its sprung limbs; its unearthly gold-rimmed eye daring my step. But I am stock-still in amazement at this late-in-the-day gift. I will not shift until it does. Don’t mess this up. Its ears are alert to me, upright and sun-bright in the long light of gloaming on the Glen; its tawny fur, caught by the rays of the dying sun, is part-scruffed in places from amorous boxing skirmishes. I hold its gimlet eye for a heart-stopping few moments, and then it musters in a flash and darts into dusk.

This is why I have chosen this end of the day – when the light is sunken, shadow-casting and there is magic at play over the trees. As I stop on top of one of the giant boulders overlooking the glen, made purblind by the wind whipping about and through me, I begin to feel the day slipping to its close. The trees stretched beneath me are shucking their summer clothes: sycamore propellers skate and skirl downwardly; acorns join the beech mast carpet; everything ensures its progeny. And somewhere beyond me, a hare leaps home.