Strawberry moon is solstice first for Rutland Water

The weather report said clear skies and a 9.30 sunset, so I drove to the lake. The western sky was wild, the sun brilliantly diffuse behind flings of cloud and fat vapour trails.

If the lake were calm the water might mirror the light and make the solstice’s half-night brighter still. In December, I was in north Scotland near the opposite pitch of this seasonal tilt: 17 hours of black night, no moon. Tonight, reversed. But this night wasn’t really about seasonal parallels. The last time there was a full moon on the summer solstice, in 1967, this lake wasn’t here.

The shout of wetland birds leads between trees to the water. Soon, deep red floods the low branch gaps of the oaks at my back, in the sky above them the glow of unseen fire. Then the moon. It rises opposite, swollen and translucent, over rolls of land on the east shore. A strawberry moon. Not for colour but, so said Native Americans, signalling the start of the picking season.

With Rutland Water’s completion in 1978 this unremarkably pretty landscape gained a fine feature. It’s an important wetland now. Ospreys, lapwings, binoculars, bikes. It’s happily busy a lot of the time. But it’s peaceful at night, the water a shimmer where once there would have been black, bar the odd electric light from Nether Hambleton. The strawberry moon they saw in 1967 would be the village’s last. This one, Rutland Water’s first.

The moon sharpens as it rises and brightens for a few glorious degrees, throws a brilliant streak on to the water, then blurs behind high cirrus.

It’s buggy, so I leave the shore and the rioting birds. Away from the water I lie near a horse chestnut and watch the sky.

The lightest night of this year couldn’t be any lighter. The haggles of cloud in the western sky settle to swept strokes, the tree-line stark against a fading stripe of bright gradually moving north, north-east, east, and intensifying to dawn. Soft light, soft dark; mediated by the wandering moon, neither wants to commit as they face off across the sky. Tonight, neither wins.

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