Country diary: Starry-eyed, watching the lights in the dark | Amy-Jane Beer

Welburn, North Yorkshire: The moon is yet to appear, but the night is vivid with something larger than life

The sun has stalled. Solstice is from the Latin Sol and sistere, meaning to stand still. In December, the hiatus is around our star's southernmost rising and setting points, and appears to last about two weeks to the naked-eye observer. In the northern hemisphere, it brings us the shortest of daylight hours. There weren't enough today and we finished our afternoon walk in gathering dark to the sound of avian roosting rituals, and the nightly round of blackbird pseudo-alarm calls - the passerine equivalent of crying wolf to startle others into vacating favoured spots.

By 10 o'clock, the cold is clean and sharp as a surgical blade, and frost dazzles like diamond dust by torchlight. Nothing stirs in branch, briar or bracken, and the moon is yet to appear, but the night is vivid with something larger than life.