My planner, desktop and wall calendar are all now telling me that summer is now all but over, at least from an academic point of view. With just a few days left before the advent of new classes and fresh starts, the thoughts of all teachers around the country are very much tinged with an autumnal hue as the prospect of the new term looms, but the weather outside my study window has decided, for the time being at least, that summer is not quite done yet.

The days retain many of their hours of sunlight and, with them, their heat, and, although I’m not usually a fan of such warm weather, it does offer one big advantage: the blackberries will be ripened nicely now, “cobwebbed and dusty as a Claret/laid down for years in a cellar”, to appropriate a beautifully apt simile from Owen Sheers.

When I was a boy, I recall blackberry season being such a highlight of the year. Unlike the “milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots” with which Seamus Heaney remembered collecting them, I recall hordes of people descending upon the dockland a couple of streets from my mother’s house, filling up supermarket carrier bags, plastic ice-cream tubs and even coat pockets with their bounty.

Often, a number of generations of same families would turn up together, from adults right down to toddling grandchildren, chatting about goings-on within their families, births, deaths and a whole array of other gossip as juicy as the fruit they were gathering. And of course, the same families would turn up year after year, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, picking and talking, picking and talking long into the summer evenings.

Of course, time and age have plucked their share, as have the consumerist leanings of modern society, gradually widening the gaps between those sets of shoulders until now, barely anyone turns up to pick the blackberries aside from the birds, and the majority of the fruit spoils and wastes for another year.

I am one of those faces that no longer harvests those fruits, mainly because I live a couple of miles further inland and now have my own blackberry-picking spot. Way up, on the high path of the hills behind my home, where few people ever bother to venture, a thick stand of blackberry bushes offers me more fruit than I could ever need , and every year I spend a little time gathering it for my fruit salads and occasional baking, though whenever I’ve been picking, I always feel that I come back home having found much more than a simple tubful of berries.

A habit worth forming is a habit worth passing on to your children, and so I began taking my daughter up to the slopes for these forays. She had her own little tub, a little pair of gardening gloves to protect her hands from thorns, and so she too became part of the late-summer ritual, looking forward to the event that it had become, developing that same annual “lust for picking” shared by countless millions through the years.

Time has now stolen this from me too. It was only a matter of time I suppose: having started secondary school last September, Elle is now far more interested in new friends and her new phone than in picking up old habits with her old man.

So here I am, climbing the slope alone this year, carrying only my tub and a tatty old pair of gardening gloves that I’ve been meaning to replace for more years than I can remember. Still, I reckon she’ll show a little more interest later when those familiar smells of blackberry and apple crumble start wafting from the oven and swilling around the house like the last dregs of summer’s fine wine.

Have you ever experienced one of those moments when something is said, and you know, for whatever reason, that it’s hugely significant, even though the reason for this might not be immediately apparent? I remember one of those moments now, only because it has finally gained the context that allows it to make sense, kind of like blinking yourself out of a dream and into the wakeful clearness of the day.

This particular moment happened at university, in a packed lecture hall during a lecture on Wordsworth’s 'Tintern Abbey'. Not only did the poem immediately establish itself as a firm favourite (even to this day vying for the position of absolute favourite with Keats’s 'To Autumn') but something else seemed to strike a chord when the lecturer, discussing Wordsworth’s walking tour and views over the landscape, said: “When you leave here today, remember that whatever you look at, someone, somewhere, either owns it or controls it in some way.”

For years after, that sentence swilled around loosely in a dark, neglected corner of my memory until eventually my interests meandered through the world of angling and its writers, spilling over into a more panoramic interest in nature writing and the wider natural world beyond the seas and estuaries and rivers I knew so well. Suddenly, a whole new world opened up to me: George Monbiot’s theses on “rewilding”; the often parochial, intimate observations of Deakin and Blythe, the country-crossing ramblings of MacFarlane and the ecologically-tinted wilderness wanderings of that great modern-day voyageur Sigurd F. Olson, to name just a few. I became fascinated with my own self-built grand fantasies of “wild secluded” Canadian wilderness and the “deep seclusion” of remote Scottish highland forests, lamenting the fact that there were no such comparable things near to me, vowing that ‘some day I would...’, a burgeoning sentence whose wide open spaces were filled with a rolling sequence of overblown, romanticised ambitions that would arrive and then disappear almost as suddenly, carried away upon their own energy as twigs in a stream.

But then, something happened. With further reading, came an awareness of the deeper themes and arguments that ran across decades and continents, leading me onto some strange assimilation of all these factors, and it was whilst I computed all of these ideas and influences into my own understanding of the natural world that the old phrase from my university lecture that seemed so long ago finally found a niche into which it could click, where it began to cast light upon these new ideas, kick-starting a new process of understanding.

I quickly realised that the phrase “natural world” belonged within quotation marks. Why? Because I could no more define it than could anyone else. My understanding of the “natural world” is uniquely my own, and thus, should be taken with a pinch of salt by anyone other than me, as should anyone else’s version. Perhaps the “natural world” as society has come to understand it is a concept that doesn’t actually exist. Maybe it never existed in any one true, idealised sense. This revelation was finally hammered home when, as chance would have it, I returned to the source of my early fascination, re-reading Lyrical Ballads, this time in preparation for teaching it to A-Level classes of my own.

I devoured the book quickly, looking for remembered phrases and lines as I might scan for friends on arriving at some party. There they were, tripping off the tongue once more until, that is, I returned to Tintern. The powerful words and images were still there alright, as majestic and poetic as ever they had been on my first reading years before; they had lost none of the Romantic power. But there, nestled alongside them were other more subtle things that I had long since forgotten, or perhaps missed entirely in the first place. For all of the seclusion and tranquillity and restorative power, there was also a calm and unfussy acceptance from Wordsworth, present in the “plots of cottage-ground”, “orchard-tufts”, “hedge-rows” and “pastoral farms” that were framed by “wreaths of smoke/Sent up, in silence, from among the trees”.

Here was a genius of the English pastoral, searching for silence and solitude and quiet contemplation, and having to find, instead, a negotiated version of the natural world. In a landscape as used and farmed and tamed as the British countryside, even the great searchers who had come in search of their own idea of nature had been forced to settle upon the version of it that was afforded them by the other people and purposes with whom they shared it: Wordsworth’s vision of Tintern; Keats witnessing the seasons change in the fields and granaries. Even the great Robert Frost could only find a road “less traveled by” in his American landscapes rather than one never before walked upon.

And here it was, laid bare in black and white lines of iambic pentameter: it is okay to negotiate. I don’t need someone else’s wilderness when I can find solitude whilst fishing an empty beach at dusk; I don’t have to hike through some distant forest when I can walk the slopes of the hills behind my home, following my well-worn route through its tree-tunnels; I can hear birdsong and wind-sifted leaves in Margam Country Park, a beautiful green space once owned by the Talbot family, and only ten minutes drive from my home, just as well as I can anywhere else. 

To some, this might be unacceptable. Maybe they are not prepared to settle for less, needing the raw confrontation of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, but that is for them to search for and discover on their own terms. Good luck to them. I am perfectly happy to give a little, working with my negotiable nature, so that I can continue to receive so much in return.

Here, on the estuary’s forgotten shore,
away from the road’s tarmac gravity,
the dark begins to pool early against
high boulder banks and the dune’s downslope.

Another swarm of dreams is scattering south.
With a luthier’s ear for resonance
and absences, the river channels out
its own meandering echo chambers.

Snow stillness; snow silence. And yet no snow:
“Too cold for it”. Deep cold, more than enough
to snuff the stars into a charred blackness
and scorch this great dark bore hole to the moon.

Everything is drawn of its ghosts

and now the frost begins to populate
this void, creeping from every crack and crevice,
extrapolating brittle feathered forms
so exact
humerus to radius
so intricate
radius to ulna;

each shiny new angle geared for flight yet still grounded come first light of morning.

- Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley

Homespun wisdom ready
to weave back into the edge
of some blossoming storm,
You waited on,
anticipating such spirit-harvests
springing from their own short seasons.
In imagination
or deep in long-held memory,
each tiny flake was already a window.
I see you, or maybe just think I do,
still looking through onto some dream meadow,
a trillion faceted blooms,
flickering in
a building breeze.