SCRAPING ice off the windscreen confirmed that this was the right day to have winter tyres fitted. The drive to the garage, leaving tracks on the frosted road, was our first serious blast of cold in months, although snow is forecast for the coming days. The morning was exquisite, hoar frost sparkling and the sky the sort of blue more typical of my home town of Dunbar, where the eye is often filled with a brilliant expanse of turquoise, above a white-flecked sea.

It is not officially winter yet, but already Dorothy Wordsworth’s seasonal ballad – “the days are cold, the nights are long, the North wind sings a doleful song” – is being played out.

To pass the time while tractor-treads were attached, I pulled on a hat and headed towards the Tweed. Although the A68 roared with lorries, the country road leading to the river was so quiet the sound of falling leaves disturbed the peace.

Hearing my footsteps, a nuthatch set up a warning cry, as it scurried along a branch, pecking while it cheeped.

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It was soon outdone by a braying donkey, which made more of a racket than the HGVs hurtling towards Newcastle. I stood to watch as it trumpeted, its breath pluming into a cloud as if it had just dragged on an e-cigarette.

Nearby its companions pulled hay from a manger. It felt like a cameo of the coming month, a scene for an Advent calendar.

A sheep began to bleat urgently from behind a hedge, and when I reached the fence I found two rams, one sturdy, the other with only three good legs. The fourth was too sore to be walked on, yet it hobbled towards me.

No doubt it was hoping for painkillers, but all I could offer was sympathy. I left it rummaging in an empty bucket, and hoped its owner would soon put in an appearance.

In the field at the top of our garden, the Cheviots have gone, replaced once again by inquisitive Zwartbles. When they see us, they approach to find out what we’re doing. Considering the ruin they made of our friends’ garden, I make a point of telling them there’s nothing worth eating on our side of the fence.

Yet as city visitors recently remarked, even when they are resting, lying with their backs to us, there is something faintly threatening about their demeanour. It’s as if they are pretending not to take an interest, or are gathering their strength for a planned assault on our premises. If nothing else, this breed is an antidote to the notion that sheep are stupid.

The iron suspension bridge over the Tweed at Dryburgh is one of the Borders’ hidden delights, although it is far from alone. There are so many attractive and historic bridges that enthusiasts spend their spare hours trying to visit them all.

The one at Dryburgh is the third, and hopefully most successful crossing, since the original chain bridge – the first of its kind in Britain – was built in 1818. That morning, the front page of a newspaper carried an image of Scott’s View, with a golden autumnal vista across the river and the Eildon hills, taken only a mile or so from this bridge. For the hawk-eyed, Hoolet could just be made out amid the trees.

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I crossed the bridge, stopping as always in the middle, in the hope of catching sight of otters, which are often found around here. One day, with luck, beavers could also be in residence, if the proposed relocation scheme brings them this far.

For the moment, the otters were keeping a low profile. A heron stood upriver, the spitting image of Donald Dewar, and near the bank a flotilla of eider ducks, some with their heads under their wings, kept themselves from freezing by gently paddling on the spot.

Despite wearing gloves, I could barely feel my hands. If you fell into the Tweed it would take a matter of seconds in these temperatures to lose all sensation, quite possibly forever.

Some years ago, in our search for a country house, we looked at lovely old cottage in Dryburgh. Remembering all the properties we viewed, I can now see that we were drawing ever closer to Hoolet even though we didn’t then know it existed.

That house, high above the river, was the nearest we’d yet come to what we were looking for. I recall a wide crack in the stonework that worried me; now, after all the work we’ve had done on Hoolet Cottage, I realise what a minor issue it would have been.

Across the river, on the edge of Dryburgh village, is a wooded knoll. It is occupied by a colonnaded monument that gives a vantage point over miles of stubble fields. This neo-classical temple, I discovered, was erected by the Earl of Buchan in 1817 in honour of the 18th-century Borders poet James Thomson.

Born in Ednam, and considered dim-witted at school, he was one of the best-known poets of his day. Although he wrote the words for Rule Brittania, his heart lay in the country, as shown in his quartet of poems, the Four Seasons (which later formed the basis of the libretto for Haydn’s oratorio of the same title).

There is great lyrical beauty in his portraits of spring, summer and autumn, but winter holds little comfort. In his day – he was born in 1700 and died in 1748 – the season was an ordeal. That he wrote this, the first of his quartet, around the time of his mother’s death in 1725 might explain its bleakness.

Even so, despite existential musings, Thomson’s main concern is with wildlife: how birds, hares, and other creatures will survive when the earth is barren and frozen, and hunters are looking to fill their larders.

The lame sheep would surely approve of the lines: “Now, shepherds, to your helpless charge be kind; Baffle the raging year, and fill their pens with food at will; lodge them below the storm/ And watch them strict…”

Thomson spent much of his adult life in London and Richmond on Thames, where he died, after catching cold on the river one August. His evocation of the depths of winter makes you shiver, and be grateful for tyres that can cope with the icy weeks ahead.

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