NEW YEAR ON SOLWAY 



OYSTER-CATCHERS in hundreds many thousands 

 altogether each with orange bill tucked in its 

 scapulars, snoozed or pretended to snooze on the frozen 

 tide margin. Though really conspicuously pied " sea- 

 pies" the fishermen call them they appeared black; 

 the white under parts were lost against the white back- 

 ground. Common gulls flapped idly down the estuary 

 or drifted, tail foremost, on the flow. " Grey-duck " (the 

 Solway name) came up with the tide, and with them 

 white call-ducks, birds which, for the time, had thrown 

 over restraint of domesticity on some frozen inland pool 

 to seek the open life of the estuary. Curlews wailed 

 across the frozen flats; cormorants, with solemn, purpose- 

 ful flight, passed up ahead of the tide, flying close to the 

 water. 



Bare hedgerow and tree, and the green grass in the 

 fields, were white with hoar-frost; even the sheep-cropped 

 marsh pastures glistened with rime; everything was 

 transformed with fairy decorations. The stiff upstanding 

 stems of last summer's nettles, the withered seedless 

 knapweed heads, the wilted nipplewort, and the untidy 

 willow-herb, still flaunting tattered white awns, each had 

 its edges and borders bedecked with diamonds. On the 

 marsh itself, where the ditches cut deep into the sticky 

 soil, water still flowed; snipe and wideawake redshank 

 probed in the only soft mud to be found, wading recklessly 

 in the shallow trickle close to the road. Titlarks had 

 found these food-supplying spots, and blackbirds rattled 

 their alarm cry as they rose from the depth at OUT 



"5 



