On Ilkley Moor

For most of the time there were red grouse in the heather, in the air (briefly), on a rock or a wall, making their characteristic noise. It's nesting time and Sunday was warm. What a difference the birds must have felt after days of snow.
And for most of the time I walked, there was no-one.
I briefly chatted with a couple about Simon Armitage's poem, Puddle, lodged in water, looking a little like two fallen gravestones. It foretold the wetness to come on the path beyond the mast - and if I'd known how wet -

I might not have carried on. I sank through snow into mud. It filled my boot. I circled water, trying to find solid ground. I sensed the bog deepening each time. I thought of the names on my scrap of paper where I'd drawn my map and decided my only route was the stone wall, to cling to it, to use its lower stones as steps and hope that the snow pushed up against it would take my weight for as long as I could get past the next expanding delta of water.
I made it slowly to the plantation I'd marked on my sketch and stood on a solid path before I eased my way down to another wall that kept the larches away from the heather, and here the grouse kept up its grumbling, totally unafraid. It was meant to be a four to five hour walk but the succession of bogs made it longer, as did being tired by the cold, and losing the path when the plantation thinned out.

When I came across a large flock of ragged, nervy sheep in the heather and heard the high call of a curlew, I realised how tired I was.
My gum was threatening an abscess, had been draining me of energy and I knew there was a way to go before I could go down.
I spotted a red coat in the distance. I'd lost my sense of direction.  But Ilkley, fortunately, has a massive crane and watching the red coat led me to its yellow frame poking out of the valley.
I found a path down from the moor. Through mossy, ancient woods I stopped on a bridge over a waterfall, said hello to a family on a bench. I walked down to a road, past garden gates and snowdrops, my Sunday no longer the moor, and the curlew - Ted Hughes' 'web-footed god of the horizons' - was far behind me, in another world.