"At the moment it is June and the weather is deceptively pleasant. The clumpy trees around the cottage are now in their early summer finery, ranging from the cauliflower white of a flowering hawthorn to the bright white of broom bushes also in flower. But in the winters that seem to last most of every year the nest of foliage around the cottage falls away to leave it exposed to the blast of winds that try to suck the very mortar from between the stones.

Down in the cottage paddock I can see where the brook goes underground into an ancient, stone-lined tunnel, and I am reminded of the time I had to crawl through that tiny tunnel to rescue a trapped foal -- in total darkness and with water up to my chest.

On the other side of the cottage is the simple barn we built from recycled ship's timbers. It still stands up proudly against storms and gales. It is where we store the hay to feed our ponies in winter, hay that we must buy-in, for our land is too poor and too high above sea level to grow grass that is much good for cutting. Between the barn and some forty acres of mauve-brown, unbroken heather that we call 'the moor', is a boggy six-acre field stippled with the fluffy white heads of cotton grass. This is the land we rent for our ponies from neighbours who live nearby in the tiny village, a village that holds the record as the highest above sea level in England. Beyond the rented land is an abandoned farmhouse, a 'time capsule' that has been left untouched for many decades, complete with all its furniture, its dead owners' clothes and possessions.

Beside the field we rent is another, smaller field, close-by the cottage. This is our own. Two brooks cross it, pounding over the rocks after heavy rain, while in the slow pools made by drier weather the stream-side ferns shade lazy trout. The main brook is bridged in several places by sets of long, chunky lintel stones laid side by side across the stream to form a more-or-less flat bridge. With the passing of the years these cart-worn stones have shifted, the bridges have become uneven and broken. A month ago the marsh mariwhites that grow along the brook banks were pushing their crowded flowers up between these stones, brilliant yellow blooms the size of old English pennies.

The brook loops around the cottage then passes under the road, where it bursts from the other side in a waterfall fringed with bright green cushions of moss and rosettes of ferns that uncurl their fronds like little green fists. Here the brook starts to cut down into the land as it passes the unmarked foal cemetery, and peat does not lie around its banks as it does above. There are numerous stones and boulders exposed on the surface there. In rare hot weather, watchful lizards bask on the stones, while between the rocks a fluffy grey lichen something like reindeer moss clogs up the stems of bilberry and heather.

In the meadows above the brook pink cuckoo flowers are succeeded by glowing buttercups and blue veronicas in May. These are in turn replaced by the frothy white of heath bedstraw so like patches of soapsuds across the sward. Yellow flag irises five feet high crowd parts of the brook by then and it ranks as the most colourful time of year on the Moss alongside August and September -- the time when the moor and surrounding hills turn rich mauve with the massed flowers of heather. It is when we see that sight that we know winter is not far away. It will be only another month perhaps before the first snow flurries etch the rocks and hills into a sepia and white photograph. Further snowfalls will quickly obscure landmarks altogether and it will be the time for coping with no electricity and being cut off from the rest of the world by huge snowdrifts with wind-sculpted overhangs and long tapering tails that lie across the lane and build up behind the drystone walls. The first time it happened we were marooned for days with no electricity, heating or water supply, we had to live on raw food and to retire for the night at four in the afternoon when it got dark.

Water for the ponies and ourselves has to be dug for in such times of snow, for the brook is buried under the snow drifts, still flowing but hidden away in a secret snow-cave where amongst its banks of rushes little birds still fly under the warmth and protection of the snow-roof. In the blizzard raging above that roof, bales of hay have to be carried from the main barn through the drifts and the flattening winds to distant outbuildings. In such times anything could be happening in the outside world and we wouldn't know about it. Between the falls of snow the dismal rains and hill fogs that cling about the peaks run into endless weeks that make spring seem as if it will never come again. But at last in April it does and the Moss is for three or four short months a different world again..."

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