The days before Christmas being short, and fine ones rare, I was inclined to make the most of this one: a present to myself. So when the sun slid below the horizon, I still had another hour to walk across the darkening moor of Redmires. Its name is entirely apt. In the last embers of a clear winter’s afternoon, the moor glowed with the copper of sedges and rushes, the bronze of bracken gone over in the first winter frosts. Up close, of course, that overall effect of redness disappeared. When I bent to look, there was green everywhere: dull patches of spiky crowberry, the lime freshness of sphagnum, and in one flush a vibrant growth of pennywort as fresh as a bowl of salad. But straightening again, the moor was once more intensely red, almost humming now in the fading light, as though I might hear it if I tried hard enough. With the red there was black too, in the squelch of peat and the black ponds I skirted, their depth a secret that I was struggling to leave undisturbed. In fact, the entire hillside seemed to be deliquescing, threatening to slide off downhill towards the three Redmires reservoirs below. I wondered at the generations who worked this marginal ground, the challenge they faced, captured in place names that tease out its soggy nuances in the same way that Inuit words do for snow: moss and mire, carr and sitch, or, round here, sick, which explains how I grew up in a neighbourhood called Carsick. Nor is it a coincidence that so many of the gritstone blocks that pepper this landscape, silhouetted now against the dusk, have names – solid reassurances in a spongy, shifting world. Underfoot, the rocks offered security among the gloop. Ahead, Venus shone more or less where the sun had set, the strip of sky above the horizon the colour of a peach’s skin, fading rapidly to purplish blue. Higher up the moor, from the darkness, the cackling rattle of two grouse broke the silence, meaning to chase me off down to the reservoirs, their surface quicksilver in the gibbous moon rising behind me. Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary