Country Life
By IAN NIALL To live 'up on the tops' is to challenge the elements, have the wind tugging at the roof, rushing smoke back down the chimney and wailing in the keyhole, but those who live there are used to it, like the lean- ing trees and hedges. The gale we hardly notice in the village rips across the bare fields up there, trundling bits of dead briar from broken hedges before it, and combing the whole land with an invisible comb. Although the storm had ended when I walked up to took about me, there was evidence of its passing in the straw that decorated a hawthorn in a cottage garden, a fallen rose trellis blocking a path, and a tumbled feeding-trough that should have stood where bullocks are usually foddered. 'Didn't it blow!' said an old fellow with weatherbeaten cheeks as he came out to retrieve a piece of corrugated iron formerly used to confine his chickens. 1 agreed, but couldn't recall that the gale had, disturbed me in the night. No one up on the top had failed to know about it, however, for as I passed through the hamlet I saw signs of the wildness of that night everywhere. This was the aftermath, the extraordinary calm in which people come out to look at lifted slates, the damp patch on the limewashed wall and odds and ends of their possessions lying drunkenly about their gardens. I saw it and was thankful to think that I live in a sheltered hollow.
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