The lane begins to drop away under your feet, the camber tilting gently toward the stream you cannot yet see. Gritstone walls rise on either side to shoulder height, furred with moss and the pale rosettes of lichen, and above them the hedgerow leans in close. Hawthorn berries hang in dark clusters, gone past scarlet into a deeper, older red. The afternoon light comes down through them in slow thin slants, gold at the edges, catching dust and small midges in the air. You walk without haste. The leaves underfoot are wet only in patches, and where they are dry they rustle, and where they are wet they give back no sound at all.
The lane curves, as lanes like this do, following some shape in the land older than the lane itself. On your left a beech has shed most of its copper, and what remains hangs in tatters the colour of weak tea. The trunk is smooth and grey and damp, and where it meets the wall it has pushed a single stone forward over the long slow years, tipping it out by a finger's width. You run a hand along the top of the wall as you pass. The stone is cold, the moss colder still, holding the damp of the morning and the damp of the morning before that. Small ferns grow from the joints, hart's tongue mostly, their fronds bright and unbothered by the season. A wren moves in the hedge beside you, very low, a quick brown scribble among the bramble, and is gone before you can turn your head.
Further down, where the walls lower and a gateway opens onto a field, you stop for a moment to look through. The grass has that late pallor to it, pale green laid over with the grey of old rain. A single ash stands in the middle of the field, nearly bare, its black buds already formed against next year. Rooks are moving in the far trees, settling and unsettling, and their calls come to you thinned out by the distance. A tractor has been through the gateway recently, and its tyres have pressed the mud into two long curving channels that are beginning to hold water. In the water sits the sky, a paler version of itself, with a slow cloud drawing across it. You watch the cloud cross one puddle and then the other. When you walk on, the gate post is warm on the south side where the sun has been resting, and cool on the north.
The lane narrows again. Here the hedgerow thickens, blackthorn working its way in among the hawthorn, and the sloes hang heavy and blue with that soft bloom on them that comes off on the thumb. You pick one without thinking and press it between finger and thumb, and the bloom goes, leaving the skin beneath dark and glossy. You do not eat it. You set it back on the flat top of the wall where a mouse or a blackbird will find it later. A little further, the bramble is still carrying a few last berries, shrunken now, their clusters mostly black seed and dry pith. The leaves have begun to turn in their slow uneven way, some still green, some the deep wine colour they take on before falling, some already gone to a rust that crumbles at a touch. A spider has rigged a line across the lane at about the height of your waist, and you duck under it without breaking it, and the line shivers and settles behind you.
You hear the stream before you see it. The sound arrives first as a softening of the air, a low continuous note under the intermittent calls of the rooks, and then as you round the next bend it becomes distinct, a patient moving-over-stones, the particular sound of shallow water going about its business on a shallow bed. The lane drops more steeply here, and the walls give way on the right to a stand of alder, their small black cones still clinging, their leaves mostly down and blackening on the ground. Between the trunks you begin to catch the stream itself, the silver flash of it where the light finds a riffle, the deeper brown where it pools. An old bridge comes into view at the bottom of the slope. Two stone arches, one larger than the other, both low to the water. The parapet is built of the same gritstone as the walls above, and it has been worn smooth on the top by a great many hands and a great many elbows resting there and looking down.
At the bridge you stop. The stone is cold through your sleeves where you lean, and where your palms rest flat it is colder still, though not unpleasantly so. Beneath you the water moves at its own considered pace, not fast, not slow, carrying small rafts of leaf down under the arch and out the other side. You follow one with your eyes. A beech leaf, curled at the edges like a tiny boat, catches for a moment on a branch trailing in the current, spins, frees itself, and goes on. The water is clear enough to show the stones of the bed, which are rounded and pale, a few of them threaded with quartz. A trout lies in the shadow of the far bank, facing upstream, holding its place against the current with the least possible movement of its fins. You cannot tell if it sees you. You stand without moving and watch it, and after a while a smaller shadow, younger, drifts out from under a root and takes a station a little below the first, and then the two of them are there together, steady in the slow brown water, keeping their places.
A breath of wind comes up the lane behind you and finds the bridge. The alders stir, and a few more leaves come down, some onto the stone beside your hand, some into the water, where they are taken at once and drawn under the arch. The smell that the wind brings is the smell of the whole afternoon at once, leaf-mould and wet stone and the faint iron of the stream and somewhere very faint the smoke of a fire burning green wood, a field or two away. You take it in without naming any of it. Beyond the bridge the lane rises again and turns out of sight behind a thorn, and you can see the beginning of a ploughed field up there, the furrows dark and shining in the low light, and a gull or two working along them, pale against the soil.
You turn back to the parapet. A black snail is moving across it at its own unhurried rate, its foot leaving a thin wet trail on the stone. You watch it for a while. It reaches a patch of lichen and goes around rather than across, feeling its way. Where the parapet meets the buttress there is a dip worn into the stone, a smooth hollow the size of a small palm, and when you lay your hand in it your hand fits. Water has gathered in the hollow from earlier rain, and a single yellow leaf floats in it, and beneath the leaf the stone shows the faint grey of itself. A long time has gone into making this dip. You rest your hand there a moment longer and then lift it, and the shape of your palm is briefly dark on the stone, and then the stone takes its colour back.
The light has begun to go, not quickly, only by degrees. The gold has thinned to something paler, and the shadows under the bridge have deepened, and the trout and its companion have become harder to see, though they are still there. Upstream, where the water comes round a bend, a low mist is beginning to lift from the surface, very thin, drawn up by the cooling of the air. It moves along the water in slow sheets, gathering at the banks, unravelling, gathering again. A blackbird somewhere in the alders gives its late, low, settling call, and another answers from further off, and then the lane is quiet again, only the stream still talking to itself over the stones.
You stay at the bridge. The stone under your hands keeps its cold, and the water keeps its pace, and the mist keeps rising in its slow way, and the last of the light goes on withdrawing up the trunks of the alders, leaving the lower trunks in shadow and the crowns still faintly lit. A leaf falls onto the water without a sound. Another follows. The trout holds its place. The mist thickens by a breath and thins again. Somewhere behind you, far up the lane, a single rook calls once and does not call again. The stream passes under the arch and goes on, and the sound of it grows softer as you listen, or as your listening grows softer around it, the water moving away and away and away into the failing