Sunset over Cornfield below Cosdon Hill - Oil on Canvas

Living on the edge of Dartmoor we see a lot of movement in the skies, and dawn and dusk in fine weather can be glorious. A walker out at an evening hour is often rewarded with a visual symphony of sunset lights.
In this painting the sun is sinking behind Cosdon hill, one of the defining landmarks of the locality. As you climb up from the Yeo valley onto any high ground for miles around, it is not long before Cosdon and Belstone Tor beyond it begin to fill the skyline to the west.

From many corners of Devon Dartmoor is a permanently mysterious line of blue hills stretching across the horizon, now gleaming with sun on snow, or wreathed in mists and vapours, or on lazy summer days lying in cool azure contrast to the lush pastures, red earth and harvest glory of the nearby fields.
There is always something restful, I find, in a cornfield close to harvest, what CS Lewis described as "the tranquillity of fulfilled desire." I love the whispering surface sheen of the wheat or barley, and the innumerable straw verticals that together make up such a vast horizontal sweep of white and ochre plenty. It always seems a special favour to be able to walk right through a cornfield, as sometimes happens when an old footpath goes that way. Of course less people walk than ever before, and less people live in the countryside, so many paths have fallen out of use. But the ramblers associations have rescued some and the local councils often cooperate with new signs, gates and styles so that the walker does not feel disadvantaged. In a vestigial sense, the countryside still belongs to everyone, and all that the eye beholds is a gift.

I love the edge of a cornfield, too. Here you find wild grasses and other crops that have sprung up from seed fallen from previous sowings, and maybe even some bright red poppies and sky-blue cornflowers banished by chemicals from the heart of the crop but sometimes still found at the hedgerow, and all the more precious for their rarity. In early childhood the cornfields often glowed more red than yellow whilst the poppies briefly reigned, accompanied in their scarlet majesty by hosts of bright butterflies. But now to see just one of them is precious. And here where the phalanxes of wheat come to a stop, and regimental order ends, the wispier wild grasses bend and flow in gentle imitation of the breeze. Somehow a harvest cornfield reaches out to us from the past in ancient friendship, and as the hush of dusk descends and the land begins to shed its heat, the day rests in unfathomable contentment.

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