Days When The Snows Came

This morning I woke to snow on the ground and the sound of a brisk gale whistling in the cottage's portholes. Snow has finally come to West Cumbria - something frequent enough on the hills a few miles to the east but such a rarity most winters in the west as to be genuinely worthy of comment. There's an inch or two across the fields to Aspatria. Below my window, a dozen or so oval-shaped patches of green are neatly drawn up in the lee of the cottage. Around them another group of smaller, elongated ovals. Obviously Sheep-fighting Man's herd, who have been raising their new-born these last six weeks, elected to take shelter beside my bathroom window last night.