Nature Notes

Grey Skies, Grey Wagtails, Linnets, & a New Writing Companion … April 2024.

It’s been a chilly spring of grey-lidded skies and so very much rain. Sometimes, things feel far from ‘normal,’ and there is a kind of surreal, lucid edge around the lens of things, when I’m very aware the joint wildlife and climate crisis is playing out before our eyes. And of course, here in the UK, we are unfairly buffered from the worst effects unfolding. The rain caused a small landslip below the rookery on Hollow Lane in the village, bringing down a portion of the high bank. We make the weather now.

I’ve seen more grey or ‘water’ wagtails around this winter than I’ve seen before here; some have made pairs where there are semi-permanent ‘new streams,’ so I imagine they’ll breed. There are a pair in the farmyard opposite, making a buttercup splash of colour on the warm red roof tiles of the old threshing barn. There has been a boom in early flying insect life too, no doubt because of the damp, relatively warm conditions. There are big clouds of midges – large ones at that – that everyone is talking about in the village. Number plates from cars coming up on the road through the flooded water meadows, have been splatted like they haven’t been since the 1980s. The midges torment the horses in their boggy meadow, and they’ve had to wear fly masks that cover their eyes (and more specifically, their poor, tortured ears) as early in the year as I’ve known it. But that is easily sorted. And it does mean, as the first swallows arrive, that there will be more insect food available. A change from recent years.

The Rushes field, nearby.

Home Field, behind the house, is often a difficult one to farm. This year, a cover crop has gone in, that should recharge the soil a bit and benefit birds and insects with nectar then seed, and we were looking forward to some garden gate wildlife – but early on, subsequent storms have washed much of the seed and seedlings away. Often, a widening stream has run down the middle of it. But though it is looking patchy and bare, it still has enormous value for wildlife. Seemingly out of the blue, a substantial flock of linnets rose up from the field one day last month, and they’ve been here since. There have been small flocks about (less than a dozen) before and more among the gorse on the downs above us, but not as many as this on Home Field in decades. The nearest flocks had developed several fields away, on bird cover crops and field margins established over ten years and which have subsequently gone, replaced again by arable. I wonder if they are refugees from there? Either way, with a twinkling, twittering frisson of static, 80-100 of these sweetest of finches make bouncing passes over the house and my writing hut all day long.

They load the wires, then descend for the floodbourne weed seeds and cover crop below – persicaria (or redshank) mingles with dandelion, groundsel, charlock, knotgrass and chickweed. They often alight in my neighbour’s oak tree, and I can see them from my kitchen window: little streaky dun breasts, with rouge marks over their tiny lungs, and a lipstick kiss on their foreheads. I love them so much.

The dapple grey and white of flint and chalk in springtime …

I can’t believe they’re here, but I worry about them. Their habitat is so ephemeral, so transient; like the temporary bloom in midges. It seems we’ve brought back numbers by creating a habitat for a few years, then taken it away again. I worry where they will nest; that the hedges here might not be enough. That the meagre, rain-damaged crop will further fail, be ploughed, begun again or turned back to arable. At my most devastated moments, when they come twittering over in flocks worthy of a nature reserve, I feel I am watching the fading fireworks of a dying star. Their voices and sound of hundreds of wings seem to come from far away in time. Those cardinal-rose coloured breasts and sweetly-streaked kissed polls are lifted straight from sentimental, Victorian colourised greeting cards. I almost can’t hold them in the here and now – already, they would be too painful, too easy to lose again. But the field could bloom, too. It could stay. And that lilting, bouncing flight, that bright twittering of numbers, is such a joy. I only wish we could sustain it.

The linnets are not my only new writing hut companion, overbrimming my heart. Meet Tansy Beetle. Soon-to-be companion of miles, and already, hearts and souls. I am, we are, utterly smitten. Though, just at the point when I’ve more writing to be done than ever, it might not have been my most timely decision. (Oh don’t be silly. Of course it is.)

Unexpected puppy in the writing hut area …

Articles and News …

My Guardian Country Diary this month is about early spring – and a cold, wet one at that, of course – on the downs. The contrasts of dapple-grey and white snag my eye as a deeply familiar marker of spring that I always forget to look for. So it comes almost as an unbidden memory each time. It’s there in the chalk tracks and cream-plough fields, hail-full clouds, a snow flurry against an iron sky, blossom by a flint wall. Spring on the downs has a look of the substrate that forms it – a blue-merle purling of flint and chalk. I walked up a few days later with the lovely Lucy Lapwing and was delighted to show her my little patch of the world. Particularly as she’d read my book, and was moved by it. I was honoured that Lucy interviewed me at the Gathering Festival at Wild Ken Hill in 2022. We were both a bit emotional to say the least, and it felt good to show her the ‘lapwing fields’ I’d written about. We heard a hopeful woodlark, listening on indrawn breaths, our hands involuntarily gone to our hearts. The piece is here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/03/country-diary-a-day-of-so-many-nature-interventions

My Countryfile Magazine Column for April is on the surprisingly radical and hopeful institution of Village Halls. Ours, like many around the country, is 100 years old this year. Whether it’s playgroups (mine or my children’s) parties, keep fit classes, farmer’s markets, ours or someone else’s wedding, fundraising quizzes and roof-raising barn dances, I can’t recall a time when a village hall event wasn’t on the calendar. I am very attached to them and, as long as diverse, healthy, rural communities survive, there will be a need for vibrant village halls, and uses for them that we haven’t even dreamt up yet. Writing this has sparked a future project. But that’s a ways off yet! The piece isn’t online yet, but you can find others here: https://www.countryfile.com/people/opinion/ Lynn Hatzius has surpassed herself with this wonderful illustration too.

I had the honour of joining Lady Carnarvon of Highclere Castle (of Downton Abbey fame) for her Friends of Highclere Castle Book Club. It was a homecoming of sorts, as we were working tenants on the estate almost 20yrs ago, and I’ve such fond memories of the place! It was still a time when estate staff were occasionally invited up to ‘The Big House’ (or ‘The Castle’) for drinks. Here we are in the Library – a favourite room. It has a ladder and of course, a secret door which doubles up as a bookshelf … and, if you’ve read my book, On Gallows Down, I took the old cottage door key back with me to show her – but lost my nerve and kept it safe in my pocket at the last minute.

And lastly and most excitingly, the 25th April sees the launch of a new book, Wild Service, that I have an essay in. Edited by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses, and featuring explosive and compelling writing from the likes of Nadia Shaikh, Guy Shrubsole, Amy-Jane Beer, Bryony Ella, Maria Fernandez-Garcia, Harry Jenkinson, Dal Kular, Sam Lee, Emma Linford, Paul Powesland and Romilly Swann, it’s a philosophy, a call to action, a meditation, a celebration and an invitation. And there’s a Book Club with each author, too! More here: https://twitter.com/i/status/1779797839100379480

“In Wild Service we meet Britain’s new nature defenders: an anarchic cast of guerilla guardians who neither own the places they protect, nor the permission to restore them. Still, they’re doing it anyway. This book is a celebration of their spirit and a call for you to join. So, whether you live in the countryside or the city, want to protect your local river or save our native flora, this is your invitation to rediscover the power in participation – the sacred in your service.“

Thanks so much for reading – a lot to pack in this month. And excuse me, I think puppy wants to go out …

Nature Notes

Winter Thrushes, Warmer Thrushes … March 2024.

Whilst the calendar month has moved on and daylight has increased past six o’clock in the evening, it still feels wintery – chilly and damp with porridgey skies and so much water and mud. The spring I’m noticing most at the moment comes via the thrushes.

As soon as the year turns itself to the light after the winter solstice, the mistle thrush begins to sing – in fact this year, it began caroling a whole month earlier. I love mistle thrush song, make no mistake – but there is also something ‘other’ about it that is a little bit underworld, a little bit inside your head. I ought to explain.

Being one of the earliest and longest singers, both in months and day length, mistle thrushes sing from November or December, right through to July; and from just before dawn, to long after sunset. Something of a contrarian, the ‘stormcock’ sings from the tops of tall trees, even into the teeth of a gale and driving rain or snow.

Its song, as well as its colours, have none of the warmth and apricity of the song thrush. He is all argent, silver, iron and steel. Even the spots on his breast and winter-king pot belly are like thorns. His song is lovely – it truly is – but it has a lone tonal persistence through the long cold days of winter and early spring. A song that is both near and far-away, and far-carrying. A resolute snowdrop cheery-weariness through the trudge of January mud, February’s leaking boots and March’s weak sunshine. It is a song delivered like joy capped under ice. It gets inside your head with a slight, edge-of-migraine haunting. Perhaps it is only thus, if you are outside all that time with it, ready for a bit of warmth and the ease of drier ground.

When the song thrush starts up, its short, repeated phrases feel a little like this too, until the sisyphus, sisyphus, sisyphus morphs into the cherry dew, cherry dew, knee deep, knee deep phrases of warm and blossomy days. It is as if the bird is pushing spring uphill against the winter with its cheerfulness, only for it to roll back in. But as the other birds join in, as they are now – the honeyed, rich, languorous notes of the blackbird, the church-bell chaffinch – we recognise the mistle thrush’s place in this chorus at last – his is the long, lone jazz intro. The bassline that holds it all together, suddenly warmed with a primrose light, we can all get behind.

Articles and News …

My Guardian Country Diary this month is a noticing of the departure lounge chatter of our winter thrushes, the redwings and the fieldfares, in an aerial stream – the spring equivalent of swallows gathering on wires at the end of summer. You can find it here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/06/country-diary-the-sound-of-water-up-in-the-trees

My Red Kite piece is the cover story in this month’s Countryfile Magazine and covers a history of their triumphant return as a conservation success, busts some myths and dicusses some of the controversy that sometimes dogs these stunning birds. It’s not online yet, but you can read a similar piece I wrote about blackbirds here: https://www.countryfile.com/wildlife/birds/blackbirds-guide

My Countryfile Magazine Opinion Column (always beautifully illustrated by Lynn Hatzius) is one close to my heart and a very real, lived experience and crisis – that of rural housing and what to do about it. Our long term rented cottage was built in 1953, at a time of practical and hopeful response to need, to house rural workers. And despite small developments of social housing being built each decade from the 30s to the 90s, many are now privately owned and out of reach, and no new houses have been built since. There is an in-depth report from the CPRE here: https://www.cpre.org.uk/news/our-report-housing-crisis-poses-threat-to-survival-of-rural-communities/

Some exciting news …

I am thrilled and excited indeed to be part of a new movement and a beautifully illustrated supporting book, called Wild Service, edited by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses, and published by Bloomsbury. It is a cultural anthology full of diverse voices supporting a responsible and engaged Right to Roam. There is a little tease here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C4JAvEUNdZf/ and here: https://twitter.com/Right_2Roam/status/1765073071147470912?t=c5Zq0KYpL2uL71IXDNAfbA&s=19 and it is available to pre-order now, here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/wild-service-9781526673282/ More soon!

I am also really excited to be a ReWild Yourself Champion for 2024. My goodness, I’m among 9 other very cool activists and artists for nature and people. Have a peek here and do check out the other Champions and what they’re up to: https://rewildyourself.com/champions/ Again, more soon!

It’s been a busy couple of months, teaching a spell of nature writing for Cambridge University with the warm and wonderfully talented writer Jessica J Lee (whose new book, Dispersals is out in April and it’s BRILLIANT!) and I’ve been involved in a fabulous local Poetry Festival in Hungerford, with some of my former West Berkshire Library Service colleagues. I ran a Poetry Workshop with some really lovely participants and am working on a whole community ‘Postcard Poem for Hungerford’ too – in the meantime, I hope you’re spotting signs of spring wherever you are, and listening to the birds …

Nature Notes

The Shining of the Woods … February, 2024

Plague Pits Valley and its teasels, chiming with the chinking currency of goldfinches …

As I write today, there are patches of blue among white clouds sailing over, but in truth, my goodness it’s been a wet and windy start to the year. Between flooded roads and incomprehensible, prolonged road closures, it’s been hard to leave the village sometimes, and mud is a daily companion. The various village WhatsApp groups – loosely divided into hamlets in this strung out village – have been both supportive and funny. On the wild, wet and rainy teatime of a power cut, which seemed to hit random houses, we were scurrying down the dark lanes between powered cottages, with covered pots and pans of half-cooked meals to finish off on neighbours’ generous stoves. Goodness only knows what passing cars thought we were all up to …

But I love the winter and am never ready to leave the season behind, really – I love the dark, soot-calm of the nights – and the thrill of them, too; walking under starlight or moonlight, or thick cloud cover when the darkness is deeply profound. The night is truly wild. I miss the frosts and the snows as climate patterns continue to shift, with a great, unsteadying feeling of loss. But here is the dog’s mercury, the cuckoopint, the milk-white drop-pearl earrings of snowdrops, that are as tough as anything else out there, piercing the one deep frost we did have, with an ear on brightening the mud.

A march of the rude rolled tongues of cuckoopint, blowing kazoo raspberries at the winter …

February is the time of the shining of the woods – the point in the year where the woods are barest; where almost everything has been scoured and rotted-down, the curtains drawn back. Deer the same colour as the ‘wanwood leafmeal’ are visible only when they move. But any sunlight, reaching its weak, marigold fingers into the wood makes lighthouses of holly bushes and ivy – sometimes, of the scourge of cherry laurel in the keepered woods, too. The sun reflects off their wet, shiny leaves and turns them into shimmering beacons.

Sundown in the winter-pared woods

The birds are picking up the pace with their singing – the mistle thrush a constant; and though I love his song dearly, it has an association with the cold, wet tang of metal gates, closed celandines and wet feet, as another pair of wellies gives in to a thousand flint cuts. It’s a song of the see-saw of winterspring. I heard the first woodlark yesterday, out on the arable field; and it won’t be long until those high, treetop rivers of babbling winter thrushes get going, before they head back north to breed.

Up there, a woodlark, singing …

My Guardian Country Diary this month was a visit to my old haunt of Winchester. Beloved city of my childhood, then early twenties when I returned to protest road building, then as an (older) student, and so many visits and memories since. It’s one of those cities you can enjoy and walk away from into countryside very easily. This takes me on a walk beside the Twyford Down cutting, into Plague Pits Valley and up St Catherine’s Hill – the upfolding chalk of the Winchester anticline, a mizmaze and some terrific graffiti .. here’s an extract:

The watermeadows and ‘drowners’ ditches of the Itchen, the Hospital of St Cross and the Almshouse of Noble Poverty, where wayfarers can still claim a dole of bread and ale.

“From here, people are enjoying the view. There are paths along the River Itchen’s water meadows, the blue-and-bone flint of the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty, and the city: my hard-won university, the prison tower that saw the end of Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and the squat magnificence of the cathedral. Above it all, an ecclesiastical kestrel balances like a flag on the thin whip of a hawthorn growing out of the slope.”

The Mizmaze

It’s here too: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/07/country-diary-this-chalky-old-city-gets-under-your-boots

My Countryfile Magazine column this month is on the ‘crows’ of controversy. It’s not online yet, but last month’s is and you can find it here: https://www.countryfile.com/people/nicola-chester-winter-can-be-brutal-in-the-countryside-but-community-prevails along with Lynn Hatzius’s stunning illustration.

Until next month, then. You can also find me clinging on to the good stuff still on Twitter, and I’m trying to be brave about Instagram …

Nature Notes

An update, a catch-up … January, 2024.

Southern flank of Gallows Down, Combe Gibbet on top.

It’s been over a year since I’ve published a blog here – it’s been rather a busy one –  and whilst I’ve updated other parts of my website, I’ve unintentionally neglected this page …

At the start of 2023, I began writing a monthly opinion column for Countryfile Magazine, which I’m immensely proud to do. The column pieces are often to be found online as well as in the magazine itself (which is full of great content and insight) and I sometimes get to write features too (on Blackbirds, Foxgloves and Red Kites, recently.)

I’m also now writing a more regular Guardian Country Diary (online as well as in the newspaper) that usually appears in the first week of the new month. Being among these esteemed diarists (several of whom I’ve admired since I was in my teens and early 20s) is an immense privilege. The column (the oldest newspaper column in the world) reflects and addresses so much change, challenge and joy in the natural world, and I’m delighted and excited to be part of what feels like a newly-enriched golden age of all its writers.

I continue to write quarterly for the RSPB (another source of great pride) and up until the autumn, was writing the weekly, then fortnightly column for my historic, award-winning local newspaper, the Newbury Weekly News – as I have done for 20 years. But sadly, that has come to an end, with the economic challenges facing local press.

But, along with an (almost) full-time job as a School Librarian, family and other community commitments, and continuing (joyfully) to attend literary festivals and events sparked by my book On Gallows Down, writing my blog has remained out of reach, on the ‘to do’ list.

2024 is also shaping up to be a busy year (anthologies, an ambassadorship, being an environmental and literary prize judge, as well as all the above) but, whilst I’m still using Twitter as my main communication, so very much there has changed – and many good, good people have left (though many remain.) I want to keep in touch – that’s what it’s all about, in the end, isn’t it?  So I’ve decided to try writing once a month again, on the second week of the month, with a bit of an update on what’s happening, what I’ve written about elsewhere and some nature notes – and see how that goes. In the meantime, I will try to get better at other social media – Instagram included, and in the longer-term, find the time to do a Substack. I’ve always been someone who has had to  ‘write in the gaps’ and I’m continuing to do so … I’m writing and researching another book, too (eeek!) More news on that, perhaps … soon.   

Research on new project …

So this month, I have written a very sad goodbye to our beloved Labradollie/ Colliedor, Kite, in The Guardian. She was the best doggo, the sweetest, most biddable soul, who could turn her paw to any ‘job.’ A (happy for us) farm ‘accident’ between a shepherd’s collie and the gamekeeper’s labradors (mother and daughter both) she was one in a double litter of 22 pups, 12 years ago. One of her best and most intuitive, self-taught ‘tricks,’ was to learn that when I picked up my binoculars, she would be as still and quiet as possible – if I had them to my eyes for longer than a few heartbeats, she’d lay down and put her head on her paws for the duration. More here: Country diary: Farewell, dear Kite, my companion among these hills | Environment | The Guardian

My Countryfile Magazine column this month is how we need our communities when the weather freezes – I’ve many memories of knocking on farmhouse doors for a pan of hot water to unfreeze a bolt or padlock; and it’s a good reminder of how we routinely call on those farmers, foresters and gamekeepers to stop whatever they’re doing, to help in these situations – a bus stuck on a rippled glacier on the lane, an offer to drive your cans of water down to the field (when negotiating the same ice-glazed tarmac) or to bring a chainsaw to cut up the fallen tree blocking the school bus route – this week, a combination of fresh road closures (see previous Countryfile Column!) floods and a fallen tree meant the bus took 2 hours to get the kids 5 miles to school! Funny how, when they met the fallen tree, none of them knew any farmers or keepers that owned a chainsaw … hmmm.

That’ll be closed then … Rooksnest Lane, to the Manor Farm (a muse of late.)

A recent Countryfile Column, on the importance of local newspapers is up online now, here: https://www.countryfile.com/people/opinion/decline-of-local-newspapers (as ever, beautifully illustrated by Lynn Hatzius – who also did the covers for the iconic Seasons books for The Wildlife Trusts and Elliott and Thompson, edited by Melissa Harrison.) https://www.lynnhatzius.com/ Here’s a teaser of the Countryfile article …

“Local newspapers, particularly rural ones, are a vital service to the community as well as a mirror, and their slow decline is an unquantifiable loss. That personal, present, long-form witness is lost; the one that pauses in a gateway to chat with its readership, its own community.

When we found ourselves blinking bewildered on the world’s stage, it was the local paper that carried us through, especially in a time of tragedy in our town of Hungerford in 1987. When a farmworker turned a pair of guns on his community on a summer’s market day, the local paper represented us all, with quiet strength and dignity, against the insensitivity of the national press.

Local news outlets are where democracy starts, and otherwise-silent country voices are heard. And though I shan’t see myself in that mirror directly anymore, I’ve had the most magnificent run.”

That’s it for now … I hope to be back next month with more ‘nature notes.’

Thank you for reading, and for your patience!

Nature Notes

The Fallow Buck and the Lightning Fork.

Such heavy rainstorms.

What my Northamptonshire Nan would have called ‘knicker soakers.’

I walk towards the approaching thunderstorm at first; it is on the other side of the hill and this side is yet dry. A bank of heavy grey cloud deepens and white cloud moves fast in front of it, like smoke curling from a wildfire. The distant flicker of lightning comes closer, and thunder begins to close the gap, until a big fireball of light rolls like a bowling ball from the Gods along the ridgeway. There is an almighty bang.

As I turn to go, I just have time to register the big, black fallow buck, that has come into the field just 100 yards away. He seems to have materialised with the lightning, and stands looking at me. He is in his prime; his antlers, a magnificent thorny crown, as wide as if I held both my arms up to the sky. They seem to describe the lightning. He trots casually on, over the brow of the headland, and I quicken my steps home to a jog, keeping to the hedgeline. My thoughts are muddled with the awe of his sudden appearance, and the urgency to get home. I am thinking too, of the parish memorial in the churchyard, to two estate workers, Joseph Buxey, 64 and George Palmer, 32, killed by lightning under a tree near this very spot in 1837. As I reach the garden gate, a great five-pronged charge of lightning hits the hill with a reverberating crack, and the rain comes down in sheets.

Later, an hour after it has stopped, water sluices and twists down either side of the narrow lane, like twin skeins of pale grey embroidery silk – its power has already taken the edges of the tarmac down to a cross section of ‘how a road is built.’ In places, you can see the bone white gleam of chalk.

Dusk takes us by surprise.

I wander down to check the horses and the moon meets me at the gate, its reflection lighting the wet road. The horses are gently steaming, creating their own mini weather system above the downland slope of their backs. Robins and wrens are ticking the night in, like cards pegged to bicycle spokes. My iphone camera refuses the moon.  

Later still, I am called out of my writing hut by the bellows-heave groan of the black fallow buck. It is a primeval sound, hollow and indescribable – not a roar or a belch or grunt, but all and nothing of those things. A sound from the belly, a tongue in the ‘o’ of his open mouth, close and low off the hill tonight, half a mile from his usual rutting ground. I wonder what brought him here. I cannot believe another, finer buck has driven him away. He seemed mythical.

I still hear him as I go to bed, leaving the window open. The rain comes heavily again and the comfort of listening to it is thrilled and unsettled by that bugle call to the wild hunt from an Old God, and the drip, drip of water coming though, somewhere in the house.

Nature Notes

Burning Fields.

Though the unprecedented heat has eased, the frightening intensity of it remains. Coldharbour Farm and its grain silos shimmered like a mirage in the fan-oven heat. Much of the harvest there was done before the schools broke up, and woodpigeons panted on the sticky tarmac, where even the water leaks had dried up. As the temperature – according to my garden gate thermometer – rose to 39C, the road surface from Hungerford to Kintbury melted to an oily slush, the car tyres making a slicking puddling sound, as if the tide was coming in to close a causeway. The barley fields rippled like white gold shot silk; as gold as I’ve ever seen them.

Birds in the garden were more confiding, desperate for water and food in the drought. The hard, green, unripe apples made do for the inaccessibility of worms far below the baked earth.

It was difficult to sleep at night – and not just because of the heat. The brittle grass and barley crackled against the gate and the partly-felled woods had so little green in them, they smelt like kindling. The horses whinnied. Leaning out of the window, I saw a single broadsword of lightning plunge silently over the hill. I checked the weather app on my phone, but instead saw something I’d not seen before: smoke. As a ‘weather’? We’ve had field, farm and straw fires here before (and for ages past).  I thought of the news. The combine was working in a distant field, and on Twitter, fires were reported on Salisbury Plain.

Ever a fireman’s daughter, I slept fitfully and woke in the night to a rising wind, banging doors through the house and lifting the curtains into rearing horses over our bed. I glimpsed strange lights over the wood, but couldn’t be sure – Chinese lanterns? Flares or embers? A late barbecue on the hill? My imagination?

The following day a combine sparked a flint-fire just a few fields away – it was not the only one – an added, heightened risk this year. The smell of burning fields took me back to my childhood and early twenties and in my head, the loop of a much-loved song by Kate Bush; the lyrics ‘The smell of burning fields, will now mean you and here … they’re setting fire to the cornfields, as you’re taking me home’ were haunted and intensified by the keening female voices of The Trio Bulgarka and uileannn pipes. From the back garden, the big hill, tawny-gold in the copper light, gave off a big energy, and I walked out to meet it. There was music from somewhere, vans on the hill, voices drifting so that full sentences could be heard, sheep bleats that sounded like people calling – and people calling. A drone then; a helicopter, a missing young man.

The setting sun’s rays illuminated the still-smoking fields as if through stained glass. An elegiac quality. I thought of the young man, his family, the vulnerability and peril of young adulthood. And hoped.

Below the hill, all is nearly safely gathered in.  Harvested lines and fields spread like a technical drawing in sepia light; a tawny geometry that this year included borders of ‘cultivated’ stubble, as precautionary fire breaks. Our Home Field was the last to be done. The village pond dried up and the moorhens came into the garden.

It is difficult not to think we’ve run out of time to halt the climate and wildlife crisis. Hard, in the early hours, not to think of that tide inexorably rising. Not to be frustrated and angry with those that have more power and agency to effect change quickly and emphatically – and do not.

Some of my earliest memories are of my firefighter Dad, returning from long shifts in that hot summer of 1976, dousing wildfires in the New Forest. Of strikes. How the smell of smoke was strangely comforting. How safe he made me feel.

Nature Notes

Camp Albion.

I went recently to see Camp Albion at the Watermill Theatre in my hometown.  It’s a play about the Newbury Bypass road protests of the ‘90s, that bitterly divided our town. It’s beautifully written, researched & realised by Danielle Pearson and directed equally well by Georgie Staight. The imagined story is movingly told with grace and humour, and the actors utterly convincing. Hannah Brown, Kate Russell-Smith and Joe Swift played Cassie, Foxglove Sue and Dylan so well, I will keep those characters close to my heart. You see, they were all a bit me, or people I knew.  Like several in the audience I suspect, I recognised so much, because I was one of the protestors – and one of the ‘locals’.

I’ve written about that time and what it spurred me on to do, several times over the years – most thoroughly in my book, On Gallows Down. And, as I write this in a record-smashing heatwave, when we’re losing wildlife in an ever-accelerating blur, it feels as urgent now – more so, or course – than it did 26 years ago. And it really was urgent then. On one level (though it’s surprising how quickly this becomes a ‘normal’ state) I’ve lived in a bubble of panic, frustration and anger since. Though, it has to be said, I am also a naturally, cheerfully optimistic ‘Pollyanna.’ I hate confrontation and tend towards co-operation, appeal, humour and compromise. I irritate myself sometimes; but it’s a survival tool, too.

Mostly, I’ve lived with the wounded sense of not having done enough – for nature, for the planet, for the burgeoning sense of an unequal world. I was galvanised – radicalised even; but what did I do with all that? And yet, in that tiny, deeply familiar theatre, I saw, was vindicated and understood. Something good and cathartic happened. My Mum, daughters and husband (who I met during the latter part of the protests, bringing him along on a very unusual and, as it happens, chaotic, early date) saw too.

What really came across was the human story from different sides: the nuances of contradiction and compromise, anger and hilarity, peace and violence, humility, belief, and the tragedies and heroics of the situation we found ourselves in. The hardship, agency and grief.

I walked into Rack Marsh afterwards, outside the theatre (that was right next to the route of the Bypass) and stood, the meadowsweet as high as my head, remembering how we’d fought for that very place with everything we had. With wile, guile and understanding, with passion, fury and energy; with respect and knowledge from our ‘ancestors’ such as the Greenham Women – and from each other.

I went home after the performance, and with some encouragement, dug out my old folder of yellowed clippings, leaflets and letters. With something of a shock, I saw that I had done a lot. I’d pushed myself as far as I could go. I discovered an archive of buried memories. The local Newbury Weekly News paper was an enormous broadsheet, for starters, but here were hand drawn posters, rallies & trespasses, impromptu gigs, peaceful, direct action, ‘Cruise’ watch and telephone tree alert systems, adapted from our Greenham Women. There were typed instructions ‘For Nic, just in case,’ and minutes of meetings where ‘alternative’ names were used and the first ten minutes included a ‘check-the-room-for-bugs and surveillance’ drill. There were months of national newspaper coverage cuttings that I’d witnessed. Been at. Done.

I was directionless for a long time after. A little lost. The ground beneath me had quite literally gone.

To see it all as a set on a stage, in that place, shifted something. I reached back through time to a young woman in her twenties to say, ‘you did okay. You’ll be okay. But you’ll need to dust yourself off, because there is so much more to be done.’

Nature Notes

Galvanising Hope.

A week has been bookended by Festivals. The first being the inaugural Farming, Food and Literature Festival at FarmED, a not for profit community interest farm, food and education centre in the Cotswold hills, with far-reaching views over the Evenlode valley and the Wychwoods. The festival partners were Chelsea Green Publishing – and several of their authors (including me) were invited to speak in the Library or the Conference Barn. There were farm walks and workshops, panel discussions, interviews and talks, around the varied but intrinsically linked topics of agroforestry, sustainable food production, regenerative farming, land justice, inclusivity and diversity, and wildlife and agroecology. Lunch, pastries and cake (mostly from farm and locally grown produce) at FarmEAT were to die for – and the festival was sold out.

I began the day on a panel, with Chris Smaje (A Small Farm Future) Ben Raskin (The Woodchip Handbook) and Vicki Hird (Rebugging the Planet). Chaired perceptively by Nina Pullman, journalist and editor of Riverford’s (brilliantly named) magazine Wicked Leeks, we were asked to imagine our ideal future. I began with a childhood dream – memories of my much-loved ‘bedroom carpet farm’ of Britains models. But this served to illustrate what, even then, was missing from a nostalgic landscape that probably only really existed in my pony books: primarily, people and wildlife.

Little Hidden Farm, near me: agroecology & a riding school – a farm close to my childhood dreams!

The talks that progressed throughout the day were thought-provoking, exciting and challenging – with speakers and organisers self-aware of shortcomings, scope, access and scale; of what needs to change in this world of farming, people and wildlife, so that everyone is included. Discussion was lively, engaged and galvanising and the farm walks, revelatory.

Ian Wilkinson, founder and director, showed us herbal leys and green manure ‘cover crops’, full of clovers, vetches, trefoils and ‘anthelmintic’ sainfoin (a natural wormer) that fix nitrogen, build better soil, improve water catchment, capture carbon and enhance nutrient cycling. The increase in biodiversity was there for all to see, with a spadeful of healthy, ‘clean’ earthy smelling, wriggling soil, and insects and birds all around. FarmED opened just last year. It’s ambitious, connective and quietly revolutionary, a ‘farm as an ecosystem’.

The second festival was ‘Wood Fest’, a family friendly event of music, workshops and nature that runs on 100% renewable energy across 3 days, at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire. We watched bands in the ‘Treebadour Tent’ and sparked ideas and action for nature in ‘Hedgehog’ Hugh Warwick’s Kindling tent. It was always going to be hard, following the brilliant and controversial George Monbiot, but I had a nice crowd and was able to share the stage with both Hugh and his brilliant ‘Trojan Hedgehog’ ideas for positive environmental change, and Helen Beynon, author of Twyford Rising – a book about the first big, modern environmental protests, and a much-admired influential environmentalist of mine.  

Photo by Zoe Broughton

Both events were incredibly uplifting and hopeful, against the constant, increasing background roar of the biodiversity and climate crisis, when too few people are engaging or acting on the science.

Mid-week, at around 9.45, I looked up from my writing hut keyboard in search of the right phrase – and through the little bow window caught a big, fiery, blue-green ball plummeting across the sky. It moved relatively slowly and I realised, as it came through the low clouds and began to break up into fizzing pieces, that it was a fireball – a meteor that has come through the earth’s atmosphere to land probably in Wales. A misty veil of a tail followed it and hung there for a few, afterburn seconds. It was breathtaking, awe-inspiring, and sobering. It reminded me of both the beauty and fragility of the earth – and the film, Don’t Look Up. We have it in our power to change the trajectory we’re on. We could do it now.

Nature Notes

Starlings as Lighthouses.

The chimney pot starling is making a fool of me. I keep hearing swallow song – that twittering-buzz that sounds like a whole flock in one creature. I dash out several times, but see nothing. When the song comes from the hedge by the open door of my hut, I realise. A virtuoso starling, a perfect mimic, had ‘recorded’ and was playing back the song on a loop. A reel that incorporated blackbird song, thrush and greenfinch among the reel-to-reel, static, ‘dial-up’ clicks and whirrs of starling ‘song’. I’ve listened to this bird (or generations of him) since my eldest daughter was born and we moved here. She was just seven days old.

I’ve written down what the starling has copied, committed to memory and played back, every spring since. It’s a record of what we’ve gained and lost. This year, Canada goose and heron have been added, but Lapwing has been reduced down to just two peewit notes, the memory of it fading. The birds themselves gone from the village finally about six years ago.

We take the train to Falmouth for a couple of days, on a university recce for my daughter, now nearly 18. It’s exciting to travel so far west and see the landscape unfold from the carriage windows, as Eric Ravilious did, when he painted its downland and chalk horses.

Pewsey and Westbury slide by and the cream chalk fields give way to flat Somerset Levels and the beetroot-red fields of Devon sandstone.  We pass a field of pink sheep, folded onto a rosy field of root veg, that have taken up the colour. The fields, tractors and trains we change onto get smaller.

The woods have a greening fuzz and are filled with primroses. There are combes, streams and mudflats and cows coming in for milking. There are embankment rabbits, lone people in fields, galloping horses and rows of coloured houses like geological strata. We sail along the sea’s edge as if we were a ship. The names become a poem, metered by the train’s rhythm: Saltash, Liskeard, Lostwithiel and Par. We change at Truro for Perranwell, Penryn, Penmere.

The town is full of life and community; the university, wonderful, hidden in a Riviera garden of ferns. Every garden, wall and verge is a riot of wildflowers: I botanize out loud. ‘Ivy-leaved toadflax!’ ‘Navelwort!’ Oh look! ‘Three-cornered leek!’ The girls don’t bat an eyelid. 

Ivy-leaved toadflax

Navelwort

Three-cornered leek

We find the beach and though it is chilly, the girls step in. I am distracted by the seawrack flotsom on the tideline. Small birds are fossicking under the seaweed for sandhoppers. I think of turnstones, but quickly realise they are not: they are very confiding and in their busyness, allow me very close: I am astonished and delighted to find they are pied wagtails. Only last week I had written about their more colourful lemon-bellied cousins, the grey (or water) wagtail in The Guardian. I smile and feel a tug at my heart, some kind of butterfly-fluttering in my stomach: these are the ‘gypsy birds,’ pied as they are, and, as my Romany Grandad would say, the sign of a good stopping place, a home.

I watch my eldest daughter taking in the view that will become her first home away from home. I keep the sighting to myself a moment – and then tell her. We bend for some stones to throw into the sea and say together ‘Oke Romano chiriklo, dikasa e Kalen!’ (See a gypsy bird, soon see a gypsy).

We travel home, not looking back, because we have seen The Future. Out in the gently darkening fields, there are lights like lighthouses, blinking on dry land. Blue shadowed church towers, farm barns.

The following morning, chimney pot starling is reporting in his sequinned gown of oiled, preened feathers. And at last, the swallow’s song comes from one overflying – as well as his throat.  

Nature Notes

The Red Chestnut.

The red horse chestnut, toppled in the last February storm beside the white cottage, is budding and putting out leaves. It keeled over from its roots, snapping most of them, but possibly leaving some in the ground. The root plate is large and the lifted, conical plug, a geological core of layered chalk, flint and orange clay. A pool has formed in the crater. We check the upended roots for treasure. The tree is perhaps 250 years old. Who knows what may have been buried next to it, when it was planted? We find fragments of willow pattern; an old, curlicued fork.

It was planted as an ornamental tree, with another (still standing) in this triangle of remnant parkland. The horse chestnut, a quintessentially ‘English’ tree, with its polished mahogany conker fruits, actually comes from the Balkan Peninsula and was introduced in the late 16^th Century. This red variety produces wonderful pink candelabra-blooms, and my growing-up children still know it as the ‘strawberry ice cream tree.’ But unlike the spiky green mine-cases of the more usual white-flowered horse chestnut, or the fiercely hedgehog-spined fruits of the sweet chestnut, this tree’s fruits are strange, dull, olive-green and smooth, plum-sized or pear-shaped. 

The tree fell across the footpath, and the thick mass of twigs in its upper crown were quickly chainsawed off, to leave a stacked, neat, airy forest of stationery: white pencil ends along the path. But we are stunned to find that on the formerly lower branches, the fat, sticky, caramel buds that continued to form, have cracked open, and pale, green, rumpled leaves are emerging.

The sap is still rising through this downed tree. Life still coursing through it. The leaves are wrinkled and damp as unfurling butterfly wings, and between them, the cracked, brown beetle-carapace of the bud cases, tacky enough still to stick to an inquisitive finger, are peeling away to reveal what might yet become the towering flowers; the tiny, mint-green, pyramid-shaped broccoli heads that might become conkers.

Through the trees, the fields are greening up; the sickly yellow sprayed-off stubble has all but gone, but the dramatic memory of how it looked on freshly-drilled cream fields, under a light covering of snow on the last day of March, remains. Blackcaps sing their scratchy, melodic jazz through other trees’ branches.

That this tree effectively died in that storm back in February, but still has enough of a season’s stored response to water, light and warmth, coursing through its cambium, to burst forth into perhaps its last spring like this, fills me with a mix of wonder, triumph – and sorrow.  I lay a hand on its smooth, horizontal trunk. Pat it like an old workhorse and all the time, line by remembered line, the poem, The Trees by Philip Larkin comes disordered into my head, rearranges itself, and seems more poignant than ever. The neighbouring wood is due to be felled, fully legally and licensed, just as everything is coming into vibrant life and the birds are nesting. Sometimes, it’s a weight I feel I cannot bear. Not again.

‘The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief …

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’