I'm writing this sitting by the woodstove, it's dark outside, the winter's cold is coming, though the wind has stilled, and the day is almost over. I've been reading Sarah Moss's new novel, Ghost Wall, set out on the moors of Northumbria where ancient people made sacrifices in the peat bogs and I'm glad to be indoors. It's Halloween and not a night to be out among the spirits.
I'm not superstitious, but there's a strange change in the way I feel about being out when the light falls early. I was up on the Ashdown Forest this afternoon - it's not a forest in the modern sense, but high open heathland with vast views to both the North and South Downs. The Forest feels as if it goes on forever, though it's only about ten square miles, but it rises above all the surrounding farmland and villages so when I'm up there I feel as if I'm in another world.
By the time I parked at Old Lodge it was almost 3.30 and the sun was already low. I didn't hurry, but when the light began to fade I turned back. The Forest may be small, but it's easy to find yourself further from home than you thought, and when it's dark the heathland feels enormous.
All the time I was there I saw no one, though I could hear cars along the High Road. I saw a buzzard, crows, ponies grazing, a black deer that watched me from a stand of Scots pines. The ground was still dry from the long hot summer, the heather scratchy on my shins when I left the path to explore a lump that might have been a tumulus.
There were iron age people here, before the Romans. They left their marks in hill forts and tracks and burial mounds. When I was a teenager I spent weeks up here excavating one fort, found an ancient nutshell in the midden beyond the fort's walls, post holes, stones carefully laid, the residues from smelting. I smoked my first cigar in the Hatch Inn, drove madly down and off the Forest to collect my A level results, and back to celebrate my leaving.
We were a practical lot, archaeology being almost entirely manual labour - digging, scraping, barrowing huge amounts of spoil. And we lived on site, camping where the Romans must have lain when they arrived, laughing about the legionnaire who walked the walls, whom no one saw or believed in.
It was easy to laugh when it was light, or sat round the fire close together, the Forest invisible beyond our circle of crackling light and heat. But on the long walk up the road from the pub, with no street lights, no houses, no torches, it felt different. It was dark, truly and deeply dark, and time seemed somehow fluid, as if all the people who had ever been here might still be walking among us.
It's a luxury to experience dark like that.
Sometimes, I wait till late, when no one else will be out wandering and I walk away from the lights of the village and into the dark of the woods. If there is no moon I can barely see the trees, except where they are silhouetted against the faint orange glow from the town, so I turn away and walk south and once again I can feel the strange lightness of true dark.
It has no weight, it is limitless. I am untethered and invisible within it. There is nothing to fear.
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