Country diary: The moorland is glittering with mad stacks of rime ice | Ed Douglas

Blackamoor, South Yorkshire: They manage to lift the day out of dank drabness, accumulating in crazy formations, almost completely covering one rowan treeIn a sequence of grey mornings, this one was especially dismal. It was cold. The trees were dank and thick with mist, bark slick with moisture, whatever was left of last year's foliage drooping wetly, the bracken not bronze but dun, sliming into the earth, spring's promise unfulfilled. I dropped my chin into the collar of my jacket and started up the hill, eyes fixed on the uneven ground at my feet, marshalling enthusiasm.The change, when it came, wasn't gradual but instantaneous, as though a child had laid a ruler across the landscape and drawn a line, colouring in below with nondescript browns but above it with dazzling white. Overhead, the cloud thinned from dark to milky grey, the watery sun appearing on the horizon as I climbed out of the valley's warm bed of moist air on to the glittering moorland above. I found myself laughing, the day upended. Every tree and shrub was now coated in frosty geometric shapes, each one stacked madly on top of another. Continue reading...