Early in January 2022 walking along a local hillside grazed by sheep, I came upon a sizeable patch of ice formed over a grassy dip in the pasture…
According to Robert Macfarlane in his fascinating book ‘LANDMARKS’ a patch or strip of ice is known as a ‘Rone’ in NE Scotland (p89), and in northern Scots ‘Blinter’ means ‘cold dazzle’ as when ice splinters catch low light or ice dust (p6). Both seemed apt descriptors for the winter sun playing on the surface cracks and scratches on my ice pool. The form and patterns of the ice itself were made even more complex by the embedded grass and and shadows above and beneath.
In the Shetland dialect the colours of ice are ‘Isetgrey’ and ‘Isetblue’ (p89). Here the sunlit grey gave way to deep blue in the shadows.
John Macfarlane, in the ‘John Muir Wild Nature Diary’, describes his photograph of ice on a shallow pool on moorland in Cumbria, where it is called a ‘bog-puddle’. He explains: ‘ice forms when the skin of water is able to cool very slowly due to warm ground temperatures’, and how ‘beneath the ice, fermenting grasses glow in the sun’. Perhaps I should call my discovery a ’pasture puddle’ where the water has drained away, leaving the sheets of ice suspended over the grasses below. The meteorological term for this kind of ice is ‘skim-ice’ (R.Macfarlane p136)
This, however, is a fragile state of affairs and it is only a matter of time before it turns to ‘clock-ice’, a Northamptonshire word (p88) for when the ice is cracked, crazed and in this case shattered into slates by the pressure of a walker’s pole, a jumping child or an unsuspecting sheep’s hoof! Then the sun gets to work melting away the sharp edges and revealing the ‘fermenting grasses’ below.
