Blog
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Nature Notes
Prosperous & Starveall: Old Pots & Old Gods. It’s been a week of climbing shining chalk tracks into china blue skies. High on the downs, the views open up to Pilot Hill and Siddown Warren, then Ladle Hill, Watership and White Hill. At Granny’s Lane, a weasel shoots across gleaming flints, as if someone pulled […]
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Nature Notes
Lamplight, Wessex Heights. Ours is a literary landscape, like much of Britain. The land has a pull on us and often, the most enduring way to express that is through words, conserving or farming it; planting woods, naming fields, woods and recording it on maps. I spoke recently at The Museum of English Rural Life […]
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Nature Notes
The High Places. I head for the hills early, while there is still the mist in the valley below. Wheatears bounce from the lookout points of anthill to anthill. On this migratory highway, the round dome of the hill must seem like one giant anthill tump. A hopping place, a stopping place, a historic atchin […]
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Nature Notes
Lamplight from the Oak’s Cavern. It was the glow emanating from within the Horse Field Oak that made me stop and reappraise it. A lamplight glow that kept catching my eye as I worked; the sort of glow you might expect on opening a treasure chest, hauled from the deep. This much-loved tree stands in […]
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Nature Notes
The Saltmarsh and the Sea. It is our first time on the Sefton Coast: 22 miles of wide, white sandy beaches, dunes and a far-away sea between the Mersey and Ribble Estuaries. At Formby Point, red squirrels flicker like cloud shadow and flow like light around pine trunks. They hardly seem there. They match the […]
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Nature Notes
Fireball Harvest. In the relative cool of the evening, I go out for a walk to see the planets align. A few white moths flutter, bats hawk above my head and tawny owlets call their French name softly, persistently, from the wood; chouette, chouette. At the top of Trenchfields, above Milking Parlour, the broad, blue-black […]
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Nature Notes
Hot Summer Badgers. Unusually for us, this is our first visit of the year to the badger sett. Something happened here (and at the other badger setts locally); an indeterminate transgression from outside; a violation, perhaps a crime, that can’t be pinned down or proven – but that meant for a while, there were few […]
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Nature Notes
Bedstraws and Bee Orchids. I am at my desk when a familiar, fresh and lovely scent – nostalgic almost – assails me. Petrichor! The smell of rain on dry, dusty ground, from the Greek petra for stone and ichor, the golden liquid that runs through the veins of the Immortals. The last, fat raindrops from […]
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Nature Notes
Deep Summer The ground hardens like lime mortar and holds the flints fast at whatever angle they were last tumbled into. Some stick up like ancient weapons, stropped edges like axe heads, freshly knapped by the clink of horses hoofs, but never our boots or tractor tyres. It is the time for the slicing of […]