Atlantic cloud

It's been more than a week since I visited the shelter. Today, I approached from the north across a felled plantation that is slowly becoming a grouse moor, through wreaths of cloud.

The wind was barely discernible, and apart from the clakking of startled grouse and the hoarse, rough barking of a deer, the fellside seemed silent. Because I wasn't able to see far through the cloud, I was focusing more on the immediate surroundings with its wide variety of texture and colour.

The ground is sodden but carpeted in a rich mix of mosses, lichen and heather. I came past the water source that feeds the seven houses of Ashgill. The surface I was walking on provides the filtration for that water. I could smell the Atlantic on the air. It was a  reminder that these clouds in which I was walking had come from the ocean, lifted by the coast, then the Cumbrian Mountains, over the summit of Cross Fell, to wrap themselves around and brush the heather of this fellside, to seep into the peat, and then to spring back from the ground.