Country diary: the moment when spring becomes an unstoppable force

Kirkham Abbey, North Yorkshire: More snow came, but the genie was out, and the dawn chorus continued even as the flakes swirled

There's a view I'm fond of, and it's worth a short diversion up a steep, anthill-studded pasture to spend a while taking it in. Looking out over the sidewinder course of the Derwent, and the equally sinuous rail line to Scarborough with its toytown signal box, it takes in wooded valley flanks, a ruined priory, and the genteel Georgian doll's house and sweeping parkland of Kirkham Hall.

On this day, however, something felt wrong, though I had to close my eyes to realise what it was. It was the sounds. A peppery rash of shotgun fire had already made me tetchy, and now some trick of atmospherics, perhaps the layering of air in a clear, cold sky, meant that the other noises reaching my ear were coming from above. The murmurs of subsong, building for several weeks, were gone. Instead, a single goading crow barked over a funk rhythm emanating from a radio half a mile away where two hi-vis figures were working on the old river bridge. Behind that was the pulsed white hiss of traffic on the A64.