Beacon Hill, Lickey

The cold snap has passed and this morning is murky, overcast, but mild. The road up to the Lickeys takes me out of the Bromsgrove suburbs and up through farmland of horse paddocks and maize stubble. Behind me, Worcestershire stretches towards the Malvern hills. The road is bounded by a high hedge of holly trees mixed with sycamore, beech and elder; occasionally a crab apple tree stands guiltily above last autumn's crop of unclaimed windfalls. Then, at the roadside margin, a debris of holly leaves and twigs tells me that the wreath makers have visited before Christmas: entire branches have been sawn off, leaving discs of pale timber exposed. I pick up a ten-inch piece of branch the thickness of a broom handle and count the rings of this dense, heavy wood: about ten, as thick as my ash trees make in three years. Holly wood suddenly repeats itself to me, a forgotten origin I can't connect with the celebrity phenomenon. But I hold it in my hand, certain of it, for the rest of the walk.
Jays are screeching in the woodland nearby, and a blue tit's thin whistles break the silence. I come out at the top of the hill where a flat dome of short turf overlooks a golf course at its base. Beyond it, I can see the beginnings of Birmingham's western edge: the defunct Rover works at Longbridge, Cadbury's Bournville plant, the University tower at Edgbaston. Ranged along the hill's edge is a row of wooden benches looking towards the city. Several have wreaths and bouquets in memory of those to whom the benches are dedicated and the wrapping makes a scrunching sound in the wind. The absent observers meditated here on a view of the great city at the heart of England's midlands. Behind them, a few early walkers emerge from the mist to throw sticks for their dogs. A copse of Scots pines stands monumentally, as in Friedrich's paintings. So the new year shifts slightly in its sleep, allowing a few fragments of notice to fall from its mass: sparrows foraging at a feeder in the farmyard, a flock of siskins in the alders.