Country diary: In this buffeting wind, we are light as lichen spores

The weather for today’s walk, judged according to Sir Francis Beaufort’s wind force scale, feels like force seven – a near gale. The relevant definitions seem to fit.

“Whole trees in motion”? Branches of a gnarled mountain ash on the fellside, hunched in its own wind shadow after decades of bending before prevailing south-westerlies, clatter together as we passed.

“Inconvenience felt when walking against the wind”? Something of an understatement: strong gusts bring us to a halt and send us staggering back on several occasions as we labour up the steep, stony track.

It is a relief to finally lean over a wall, breathless, to admire the view that we have come to see: a panorama encompassing most of the upper dale, magnificent on any clear day, but exceptional this morning. Today’s gale seems to invest it with giddy energy, as if the ground under our feet is shifting – perhaps exertion and exhaustion have something to do with that.

The north side of the valley is drenched in sunshine and swept by racing shadows of torn fragments of stratus drifting overhead, trailing rooster tails of fine rain that become ephemeral rainbows, dissolving and reappearing when the sun breaks through gaps in dark rain clouds behind us.

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The wall we rest against is encrusted with lichens in innumerable shades of green, yellow, orange and grey which always seem more vivid after rain. These strange amalgams of alga and fungus, ingrained into bare rock surfaces, first arrived here in the wake of the melting glaciers that sculpted this landscape. Winter is their season, wind their conveyance. An encrustation of Lecidea lithophila – the texture and colour of a ripe tangerine – is speckled with small, black, jam tart-shaped apothecia that release microscopic spores, destined to be whisked away across the valley, over the fells.

The showers become heavier. We retreat downhill, holding on to our hats as the wind shoves us in the back. It seems to have moderated a little, perhaps to a strong breeze – force six: “Whistling heard in telegraph wires; umbrellas used with difficulty”; had we dared to raise one, it would have surely followed in the wake of those lichen spores.