I slogged up through the old whinstone quarry, staring at the ground, my thoughts elsewhere. I braced myself to find the usual rubbish left behind by quad bikers, as if the world is their personal skip. I could hear them active yesterday. The frost-covered, sterile earth stretched ahead, with the bikers’ berms and humps standing around like forgotten relics. Would they make a good photo under a layer of frost? I snapped away, just in case. Surprisingly, there was hardly any rubbish. To the north, Teesside sat under a crisp blue sky, a prelude for a crisp winter day?
Cresting the top of Cliff Rigg, I was distracted to the south by the Cleveland Hills. A thick duvet of cloud clung to them, bathed in the golden light of a winter morning. It was infuriatingly beautiful, forcing me to stop and stare like some awestruck tourist.
A Medieval tourist though, in their chivalric poetry, might have called it a “myst-hakel”. This phrase comes from the Arthurian poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
“Mist muged on þe mor malt on þe mountez
Uch hille hade a hatte a myst hakel huge”
Translated, this means:
“The moor was muggy with mist, and the snow melted on the mountains,
and each hill had a mantle of fog.”
I have wittered on (passim) about this phenomenon more times than anyone cares to hear, yet it continues to astonish me.
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