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In the week before Christmas, north somerset caught a cold, or rather a sustained cold caught north somerset. A heavy fall of snow and the plummeting temperatures that followed brought the place to a halt, and by Sunday night the remaining traffic was creeping along muffled, snow covered roads.
On the Sunday evening, needing to call on the far side of the city, I made a precarious descent into the centre of town across icy pavements, and then a long climb of the hill to the south, the name of which, Combe Down, has a certain resonance for the railways. Having found the carol concert put on hold, as I'd rather suspected, I decided on the alternative (as one does) of a swift pint in one of the former stone miners pubs, stranded on the flat, much quarried, sea-bed top of the hill. This of course made the descent of the hill no less cold and rather more uncertain, especially as I opted for one of the workmens paths locally known as 'Drungs' that run straight from quarry to village, independent of the road network.
The night was extraordinarily clear, with a great run of arctic air sweeping the country, a bright moon, iron-spark stars, little glare from the city lights in the glassy sky, and the snow-covered ground making for easy viewing conditions even beneath a tree canopy. The drung took me scrambling beneath snow-bent branches, beneath a rustic stone arch and then down into Lyncombe Vale, filled with pools of near-darkness.
Mindful of the old line threading its way through the great beds of stone below me, I made my way to an open gate leading into the field above it, and then across the crisp expanse of untrampled snow, lit strongly by the moon now and star-like reflections from the ground mirroring those in the sky. A wriggle through railway boundary wire at the bottom of the field and I was standing above the tunnel's portal, with the line, now velvet-smoothed with snow, crossing the short viaduct and running away into the cutting, curving out of sight. The portal was in shadow, deep enough to hide late twentieth century scars even if it breathed no steam, and I walked slowly into the cutting towards the summit before the bridge there and paused - some animal, invisible, was nosing its way along the cutting side some distance ahead. There was little other noise, and for once the city was not producing its roar of traffic. Looking south, the tunnel portal against the black hillside: a silhouette backlit by the moon, with Orion poised, straddling the cutting.
Ahead, the rustling stopped: the animal froze at a new sound, a low
rumble that began to fill Lyncombe Vale. Chance echoes magnified a heavy
drumming as something made its way out of the city's station and headed
east. The sound grew, probing the prosaic world's weaknesses: while
silhouetted against the snow on the old line the fox had at last
appeared, and he paused, his gaze now turned away from me as, in an
unsettling acknowledgement of the engine's noise, first in the distance,
and then closer, the branches of the trees above the line released a
thin fall of hoar frost onto the snowy trackbed. The illusion was
complete: I too anticipated the headlight of the approaching train,
climbing through the cutting, passing in a blaze of electric lights like
the old twentieth century itself, drumming into the tunnel and
disappearing into the rail-less world to the south ...
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All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.
