We started on the road at the national trust car park, after talking to a ranger about the amount of rubbish left behind. We reached a gate and turned across a field, the lake and the mountains to our right across the long grass. We crossed a bridge and paused to watch a dog madly swimming after rocks thrown for him, not minding that he never fetched anything. The path became a raised wooden walkway above marsh land, sticky treacle pools and reeds, patches of moss and lichen and wet wallowing shrubs. A great swathe of land was covered with rusty bog myrtle, spreading amber across the almost monochrome landscape.
We went through the woods, where white wood anemones dotted the leaf mulch and followed the path beside the lake. There were buds on spindly branches, pink or pale, not yet formed into flowers. Elsewhere, green shoots pushed the pink confetti of cherry and apple blossom aside.
We stopped at a viewpoint to look out, and I noticed bleached tree roots, plaited through the ground in an uneven pattern. It was growing late and the geese out on the tiny pine filled islands were honking. I swam, kicking out through black water, everything still apart from my breathing, the lap of the water as it moved against me, the distant cacophony of the geese.
As we got closer to the car, we gathered endless amounts of rubbish on the path, thrown from the nearby road. I scratched my finger on a beer can. A multi stemmed tree had been cut, its trunks now hollow pipes of wood, covered in moss, like a strange puzzle game or sculpture. On a wooden jetty, three ducks waddled, the male preening. We watched him comb his beak through his chest, water drops drying on his feathers, till he lay down on the wood beside his companions and slept.
Bonnie Radcliffe 