It may be mid-January but the first signs of spring are already showing. In Gallery Bottom wood we found the leaf buds of sycamore and hornbeam swelling and the outer scales breaking out. At the woodland edge, by an area of scrubland, we even found oak leaf buds ripening. Down on the woodland floor, the first spear-shaped leaf shoots of bluebells pushed through the leaf litter.

It may be all a bit premature though. Freezing temperatures over the past few days have frozen the ground solid. Bramble and ivy leaves remained rimed around their outer edges with hoarfrost throughout the day. Squirrels and rabbits had chewed at the first green bluebell shoots, and dug out the buried bulbs.

Only where the sun was able to reach the steep-sided valley floor during the warmest period, the middle of the day, had the frost melted, but even here, the leaf litter and surface crust was still crisp and brittle.

Sedges, overhanging the stream, were clothed in ice 20 times thicker, the sedges looking like wicks through the frozen water candles. Referred to in Sheffield manorial records as the Kimberworth Boundary Stream, it forms part of the Anglo-Saxon boundary between the ancient parishes of Kimberworth and Ecclesfield. Most of the pond at the bottom of the valley was frozen solid except for a long, open lead, extending half way across the pond, where the stream flows in. Tiny chips of wood lay scattered across the ice beneath a dead tree which overhangs the pond, where a woodpecker had been searching for buried grubs hidden in the decaying timber.

With daytime temperatures not rising much above freezing all day, very little wildlife was out and about. One mammal which had ventured forth had met a sticky end. A dead weasel lay by the pathway, its body opened and feasted upon by carrion feeders.

The freezing cold seemed to heighten the senses, with the air being so fresh and clean. Just the job to clear away the post Christmas fug. By mid-afternoon the frost was creeping back across the ground. Spring is still a long way off; despite some of the plantlife's early showing.