Wild country, wild weather

Monday 2nd January 2012

The distant ridge of today's ride (on a finer day)

I was determined to get the horse out today as she had been stuck in the paddock rather a lot over Christmas.  The temperature was hovering aound freezing and the countless showers came down as sleet, white snowflakes and the kind of snow that blows into your face as stinging ice chips.  The going was a hazardous mixture of deep mud, boggy moss, tussocks of rushes, slippery descents into rushing burns and concealed ditches and rocks.  Molly enjoyed it!
    On top of the fell, where I was riding from right to left (in this picture), a direction I had never taken  before, I came to an area of bracken and met a huntsman with hounds at his horse's heels going in the opposite direction.  Suddenly I recognised the exact spot and the scene as a picture from a dream that I once had some years ago.  I think this is the second time that something like this has happened to me.  The previous time (in the 1980's) I once dreamt that I was cantering along the edge of an unfamiliar field.  It was a very inconsequential dream  --  until I moved house a few years later and found myself riding in the very field that I recognised from the dream.
    Time and place and the dimensions of life are very much more complex than people necessarily appreciate.  As Shakespeare said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
                                                       than are dreamt of in your philosophy."