Winter has set in and the temperature has barely crept above freezing all week. Today, a thin mist hung low over Bristol, weighed down by cold. I cycled out towards Leigh Woods, my hands welded to the handlebars by the icy wind. Inside a cloud, the suspension bridge seemed like a path to another realm; you could see nothing of the land below through the whiteness. Near the other side of the bridge, the old trees of Leigh Woods floated into view, their crooked branches stark against the mist.

The murk of the woods beckoned. In damp and gloomy conditions a woodland is always intensified. They appear more tangled, more disorientating. Dark trunks loom larger through a watery sky.

I locked my bike and walked aimlessly into the forest. Frost gleamed on everything, even in the fading light. The ice revealed spider silk dripping from every branch, or strung up in webs inside tree stumps. Some webs were pristine, others collapsed and disused. Rarely seen so completely, this transient silk world had been betrayed by the freezing air.

The strands hanging from the trees had likely been used as safety lines, rigged up by spiders and caterpillars in case they fell from a branch. Or they could have been the tangled sails of travelling spiders, who use single threads to ‘balloon’ through the air in a haphazard search for space away from the writhing spider ball from which they emerged. Their silken vessel charges in earth’s electric field, lifting like hair rubbed against nylon. They can travel for hundreds of miles on the whims of the air.

As the sun set, detail seeped from the forest, and I could no longer see the silk on the trees. I was left with dark, hulking shapes, and delicate skeletons when I craned my neck back to the sky.