Country diary: white looks too clean in the ochre smoulder of autumn

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire This gently rotting place, soggy with last night's rain and morning fog, muddies itself into winter

A pair of doves settles on the stones, white as pacifist poppies. Perhaps they escaped from a loft or dovecote; perhaps they turned up separately and found the strangeness of each other in a place full of jackdaws. They have been around for a couple of years pecking crumbs outside the market, cooing from precarious roosts inside the bed-of-nails pigeon guards on roof eaves, displaying randy shenanigans on the church tower.

Shameless and symbolic, these birds are reclaiming territory on the artificial cliffs of buildings left when rock doves were changed into pigeons. There are those who see them as pests and maybe that's because those people find something a bit unsettling about the whiteness of doves, as if it's a gap in the reality of the world that could be filled with something else, something subversive.