Tower and Town, March 2024 (view the full edition)A Walk
I am immediately hit by a cacophony of starling chatter - they are everywhere, hundreds if not thousands in the fields and in the highest branches of the trees, facing the early morning sun for warmth. Suddenly a group of them head off and swoop low to feed in a neighbouring field. Gerard Manley Hopkins' Windhover comes to mind - "I caught this morning morning's minion" - but there is no falcon here; a buzzard, yes, perched on a fence post and then off hunting along the hedgerow, while a pair of red kites soar overhead. The chalk path climbs away ahead of me towards the skyline, and on I stride leaving the starlings behind. The ground is rock hard and the ice from the smashed puddles is up to two inches thick. In Next to Nature Ronnie Blyth writes of hard frosts at his home, Bottengoms Farm. The ice on his ponds is "mere thin crackles around half-furled marsh marigold leaves, nothing extreme - a sunbeam would see it off". No chance of that here. The sun may be bright but the temperature is still well below freezing, and the puddles remain frozen solid. I reach the crest of the rise and stop to take in the vastness of the landscape. Miles of downland stretching as far as the eye can see - the whole of North Wiltshire laid out before me in a 360 degree panorama, and not a human being in sight. Time for coffee so I sit on a nearby stone. An information board tells me that what I am sitting on was transported to the area through glacial action during the ice age - I feel connected with the past. My journey home takes me past the grey wethers (so called because from a distance the stones look like sheep grazing); gallops and exercising racehorses; dips and hollows where the sun has not reached and the grass is laid flat by the cold and frosted white; and a copse called The Warren. I pass a woman and her dog who berates me for not wearing a woolly hat - she is quite right, I left it on the hall table! David Du Croz |
They say it was the coldest night of the winter so far but the sun is out, so gloved and scarfed I head into the bright blue yonder.