REFLECTIONS ON A MID-WALES DRIVE

I had a long drive to make last week - up to Caersws in Mid Wales - and on one of those perfect autumn mornings that seems to call you to make a start just as soon as it is light enough to tip jugs of warm water over the car’s frozen windows.

It was a simple drive, up the A470, the ‘spine’ road of Wales that runs supposedly from north to south, except that it is not a single road but a collection of bits and pieces, cobbled together on the map, no doubt, by some enterprising engineer sitting in a London office in the 1920s without much else to do. All the same it makes for easy navigating.

The route traverses magnificent scenery and on this morning of sharp frost and bright sunshine, the countryside white with ice crystals, the air still, the sky blue and almost cloudless, the light translucent and brittle, every feature was thrown into the sharp relief.

Passing Garnant lake in the Brecon Beacons National Park the black water shimmered smooth as glass. Away on the far side a patch of mist floated ethereally a foot or two above the surface in the crisp morning stillness. I reflected how timeless this scene looked, how it would have been instantly recognisable to our ancestors two thousand years before. Indeed how Celtic it appeared, with its themes of water, air, light, mountains.

So strong was this resonance that I half expected to see though that patch of mist an arm rising out of the lake holding a jeweled sword - beckoning to a future King - and an old man in a wizard’s hat sitting on the bank.

I progressed onwards - and as far as Wales was concerned - upwards towards the softer Montgomeryshire landscape. The temperature dropped steadily. Passing Cardiff it had been 2 degrees. At Merthyr Tydfil it had dropped to zero, was minus one at Becon and minus two at Builth, where the River Wye tumbles along among the boulders of the river bed.

Near Rhayader, with the temperature still falling, a large raptor, flapped lazily out of a wood and laboured slowly across the road in front of me with the unconcern of an elderly pedestrian oblivious to the traffic. For a second or two the bird was a few feet from my windscreen; I could see every detail of its markings and its long yellow legs that trailed behind it. I took it to be a honey buzzard, but my bird knowledge is scant and it may well have been something far more exotic. Anyway it seemed to know it was a protected species and I found myself braking hard to avoid it.

I was meeting UNESCO colleagues in a small country hotel - one of those interminable all day meetings that seem to characterize anything to do with government. To remain alert is an effort, so I was happy to be distracted by an urgent message on my mobile. I excused myself from the table and went to stand beside an eternal window to make a call.

Then I noticed a robin, hovering at the height of my nose, a foot away on the other side of the glass, its feathers puffed up against the cold. Some see robins as birds of ill omen - but the poor little beastie just seemed to me cold and thin - envious of the warmth and plenty inside. So I filched one of the hotel’s biscuits and went outside where the robin had been and left the biscuit broken up on an old flower pot. I hope the robin found it.

Eventually the meeting ended and I went out to the car park through the bar, which seemed strangely full for the late afternoon in those underpopulated parts. I first noticed the tipplers’ boots. Most sported those expensive and superior Wellingtons with straps and buckles of the sort favoured by shooting parties and similar folk. There was a press of male laughter, loud, slightly aggressive, which made me feel uncomfortable and on which I was happy to shut the door.

This was indeed a shooting party. Rows of bright autumn pheasants hung in braces over the car park railings beside the mud-spattered Landrovers and 4 x 4s, in the gathering twilight.

Shooting always induces a conflict in me. My head tells me that I would far rather be reincarnated as a pheasant and take my chance with the flying lead than to be a battery chicken. Still less a sow, tethered in a concrete stall. I know that shooting is an important source of countryside income and that the destruction it causes is balanced by a considerable amount of conservation. I know that the pheasants are raised and so in no danger of extinction.

But my heart always winces when I see a beautiful cock pheasant tumbled out of the sky and lying dead and bloodied on the ground while fat business men with more money than sense stand jesting around it.