On gossamer threads

Wreathing the land like an ethereal veil, mist turns valleys into an opal sea, coats moss with an emerald glow and wraps the tingle of the skylark into a wispy enigma. John Lewis-Stempel revels in its silvery beauty

- John Lewis-Stempel

THE climate is objectionable, with its frequent rains and mists.’ So wrote Roman historian Tacitus about the ‘wretched’ weather of the empire’s colony in the far-flung North. The Latin invaders of these isles, the poor things, never appreciated the strange beauty of mist, its beguiling capacity to transform landscape, to alter the mood of place. Once filled with mist, a green valley, when viewed on high, becomes a pearl sea; where there were the bare trees in the copse, there poke the masts of long-abandoned pirate ships. Where there was post-harvest stubble, the mist rolls like cannon smoke on a Napoleonic battlefield. Where there was a winding river, an albino anaconda seethes its way. Those great dimglimpsed shapes shuffling along through the meadow? Not cows, but aurochs.

Mist. It is not only for Keats’s autumn of fruitfulness. It appears in every British season and adapts to suit: the mist of winter has a cemetery eeriness; the gentle mist of spring in the meadow, the sun rising, brings a lilt to the soul. Mist. It alters time, it ‘ancientises’, it softens the angular edges of the City’s glass towers, it blurs the metal blades of the plough in the field. No scene, whether city or countryside, was ever modernised by mist; it comes, always, from some portal to the past. The ‘primordial mist’. The ‘mists of time’.