On the shortest day, 21st December 2025, under heavy skies, the light arrived reluctantly, like a visitor creeping late into a church service, hoping to be unnoticed. It arrived in Nowhere Wood as a diffused light, fading the dark into a gloomy, dignified grey.
The leaf litter lay sodden and heavy, mud tugging at every step with a damp, muffled pull, as though the wood itself were slowing its thoughts.
Nothing much happened, which was precisely the point.
Robins rehearsed their winter song from the holly trees, thinner than summer, but more earnest. Magpies bustled about, dodging the raven.
Somewhere deeper in, a squirrel sat high in a tree, eating an acorn.
A grey squirrel in Nowhere Wood. [Photograph: Andrew Town]
A greenfinch launches an aerial parade, searching up and down for seeds and insects, pecking at the branches of the holly.
The wood pond lay full to its edges, deep and cloudy, reflecting the grey sky hiding the sun. It is giving little warmth today. There is no wind to disturb the dark surface water, either.
By mid-afternoon the day was already tired. Shadows thickened around the trunks, joining up like old friends. This was the hour when the wood seemed to draw inward, not asleep, not awake, but attentive. If you stood still long enough, you might feel it: a collective pause, the held breath of roots and stones and sleeping insects. The turning point is always quiet. Nothing announces it. There is no drum roll when the year changes its mind.
At 3.03 pm, though no one checked a watch, Nowhere Wood reached its farthest point from the sun. This is the winter solstice.
The sun reached its weakest moment and fell below the surface. It has stopped retreating. The orbit of the Earth round the sun will slowly draw Nowhere Wood closer to the sun. That is enough, for today. Somewhere beneath the cloudy skies, the trees receive the signal of change and keep it to themselves. Spring is coming!
Day length is not the only cue they use, and the warm wet winter has already drawn hazel catkins and alder into flower.
Darkness came early and properly, as it should on such a day. Yet it was not an ending. Lights were lit in the houses beyond the wood. Foxes and badgers began their evening patrols. The slivery moon lifted, pale and weak, took over the night.
In Nowhere Wood, the shortest day passed almost unnoticed, which is how the most important things usually happen. The light had given its least—and that, quietly, is the beginning. From now onwards the days will get longer by about two minutes each day until midsummer’s day in July.
Slowly, slowly, Spring is coming.
Season’s greetings from Nowhere Wood!
Let’s travel back in time three hundred years or more, to the East End Farm, near the hamlet of Nowhere.
![Fallen ash tree trunks at the quarry face of Nowhere Wood. [Picture: Neil Ingram]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/7748b521-4f7b-4085-9e74-d5971937b62a-1024x768.jpg)
![Trees with Ash dieback disease are marked with a red spot. [Picture: Neil Ingram]](https://blog.neilingram.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/IMG_2857-1024x768.jpeg)
This means that the plant can make leaves to grow in the warming Sun. The leaves make food to store in its bulbs ready for next year. Snowdrops do all of this before the leaves of the big trees open to steal the light, so that the floor of the wood becomes shaded. By then, the work of the snowdrop is over and it can wait for the next winter.
Winter has come to Nowhere Wood and ice has formed around the fallen trees in the pond. Everything shivers and wood is silent again. Squirrels search for food in the frozen mud, but everything else is waiting, biding its time.
The tree sparrows are warm, protected from the icy wind by the layers of dead branches that surround them. Impenetrable, they are hidden amongst the branches, out of harm’s way. In this forgotten place, they thrive and they sing.