Local

I was back on the marshes where I’d begun my journey almost half a year ago. I liked it out here. A town lay in the distance, its prominent wind turbines turning steadily. I preferred these empty corners of my map, the ignored and forgotten places. I was drawn to their anonymity and the distance they put between me and all the things I ‘should’ be doing in life, the sort of things I imagined everyone else seemed to tol- erate or enjoy but that left me frustrated and wanting to be elsewhere. Perhaps that explained my recent indifference to the orderly suburbs. I felt I was the only one who thought this way, yet I’m sure there are other people on my map also quietly pounding the walls and howling at the moon. But I didn’t know any, and never saw anyone else in these empty places. 

Much of today’s square was taken up by stuff that loosely lumps together under the heading of ‘infrastructure’. Railways, roads, round- abouts and railings. Big metal things. Corrugated sheds. Padlocks. Pylons. Pick-ups with orange hazard lights. Men in hard hats. Things I don’t understand but that I know are important. All the ‘Keep Out’ signs on this grid square were definitely for the best. 

I tried to get a closer look at a 400kV electricity substation, but its mysteries were obscured by rings of trees because, between 1968 and 1973, an admirable 725,000 tall trees, 915,400 smaller trees and 17,600 ground cover plants were planted to screen substations across the land. 

My limited interest in infrastructure exhausted, I followed a cycle path alongside the dual carriageway, dodging broken bottles amid the traffic roar. The smells of warm tarmac and diesel brought back fond memories of cycling the world’s highways. I peered down from a bridge at an overgrown pond, thick with slime and dotted with traffic cones. Then I turned off at a slip road and rode into a town. There were large, 

Suburbs 

detached houses at the top of the hill, and the homes became smaller and closer together as I freewheeled down towards the town centre. A pony and trap cantered by, ridden by two young lads in vests, and trail- ing a patient line of backed-up traffic in its wake. I left the main road to go and cycle around some residential estates. 

Over the course of this year, I’d always enjoyed visiting grid squares that most approximated wild countryside. And I also liked the busy towns brimming with human life, beings equally intrigued by man- sions and poorer areas. Today I was bang in the middle, riding through street after street of suburban homes. 

‘Get out of the bloody field!’ 

‘I’m on a bloody footpath!’ I yelled back, both because I was angry and because the man leaning out of his 4x4 window was far away on the road. 

It was an ineffective, hard to hear argument, so I just turned my back on the irate driver and continued following the path across a grassy field. I hate any form of confrontation – even a cross tweet upsets me all day. But this one particularly annoyed me because I was on a public footpath. 

I would have understood the landowner’s anger had there been no right of way and I was trampling crops, tearing up the land on a motor- bike, dropping litter or worrying livestock. But his assumption that he had more right than me to the earth, wind, sun or sky irritated me. 

Bluebells 

We all need to access the natural world for our enjoyment and health, and if enough of us develop a connection with nature we might be able to reverse its destruction. But our history and laws have put so much of the countryside in the hands of so few people, that we have allowed a culture to establish where going for a walk is seen as invasive or damaging. 

This ‘get off my land’ ticking-off put me in a blue mood when I should have been enjoying the clear blue skies and the bloom of blue- bells. And it was a shame, because I could see that a lot of trees had been planted here – something that always lifts my spirits – so the landowner and I probably had far more in common than the gulf of our shouting match suggested. Had we chatted congenially and disagreed agreeably, the two of us would more than likely have ended up cheering for trees but feeling frustrated at government feet-dragging. 

For example, one tree-loving landowner told me they tried to plant 200 acres of woodland, aided by receiving a grant that didn’t make the venture profitable or even balance the books, but at least made it man- ageable for them to do the right thing for the land. But they were then told to apply for planning permission to plant the wood. By the time it came through, policies had changed and the planting grant had been withdrawn, leaving them with tens of thousands of tree whips sitting in their greenhouses. It is so frustrating to hear stories like this. 

I passed a primary school in a forgotten-looking estate of identikit tower blocks as I cycled into today’s grid square. The playground was full of joyous shrieks and laughter, and three colourful quotes were dis- played on the wall: 

• ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.’ – Carl Sagan 

• ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ – W.B. Yeats 

• ‘The more you read, the more things that you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go.’ – Dr Seuss

These are brilliant quotes for an education built on curiosity not box-ticking, but they also summed up what fascinated me about div- ing into my map. 

Out into the delirium of spring, riding fast and light-heart- ed towards today’s grid square. Birds belting out love songs in every hedgerow. The first blush of sunshine in the oilseed rape fields, pret- ty but terrible for leaching nitrates into waterways. The first sulphur- ous brimstone butterfly, a yellow that put the ‘butter’ into butterfly. In Every Day Nature, Andy Beer suggests you note the first date you spot one and call it your Brimstone Day each year. I liked that idea. 

My computer calendar already reminds me of the various dates of the first snowdrop and daffodil outside my shed in recent years. The first green leaf on the tree by my window, the return of goldfinches to my feeder, the first swift and, from today, the first brimstone butterfly. I enjoy seeing these differences in nature’s calendar year on year, the phenology of where I live. 

It is a start, but my novice observations are a long way from those 

Vineyards 

of the Reverend Gilbert White, whose detailed decades of notes about the natural world around his village resulted in The Natural History of Selborne, a book that has remained continuously in print since 1789. He was a pioneering and inquisitive natural historian with astonishing powers of observation. His writing also offers an invaluable insight into rural life in the 18th century. It was often carried by emigrants to North America and Australia who wanted a nostalgic reminder of home. 

White paid minute attention to nature and recorded it diligent- ly, a practice he called ‘observing narrowly’. The more he focused, the more engrossed he became in the small wonders on his doorstep in Hampshire. For example, he observed that owls hoot in the note of B flat and surmised that willow wrens were actually three separate species by tiny differences in their songs and plumage: chiffchaff, willow war- bler and wood warbler. I’m quite proud of myself if I even glimpse one of those as they dash from bush to bush, never mind playing spot the difference between them. 

Blackthorn blossom decorated every lane this week. It was late March and the best time to spot the difference between hawthorn and blackthorn. Blackthorn trees blossom before their leaves appear, while hawthorn does it the other way round. We use many cues to connect what we see with the seasons (fairy lights at Christmas, for example), and making a conscious effort to be observant each week was building a richer natural calendar in my mind than I’d ever had before. I hope next year I will instinctively think, ‘Blossom season, and that hedgerow is blackthorn, not hawthorn. It must be late March.’ 

Now I heard the year’s first chiffchaff chirping away, a call like a tiny blacksmith hammering an anvil all day long, ‘chiff-chaff-chiff- chaff ’. It is easily confused with the great tit’s ‘teach-er teach-er’ chirp. Not many people get excited by a little brown bird with a monotonous song. But I enjoyed celebrating a feisty six-gram bird that had flown all 

Houses 

the way here from Africa. I was becoming aware of so many things that had passed me by in all my decades alive. The sense of amazement was boosted by small new abilities such as distinguishing a chiffchaff from a great tit by their songs. 

I arrived in today’s grid square down a busy road, cars swooping back and forth, that demanded all my concentration. A workman bat- tered the pavement with a pneumatic drill, and I had to turn off the road onto a quiet street of new houses before I could quieten my mind and settle into the slow rhythm of exploring. 

Just a stone’s thrown from the railway station, this cul-de-sac was prime real estate for wealthy people commuting into the city. The homes were huge, with oversized cars parked outside. But all this big- ness came at the expense of any outdoor space. They had squeezed ten identical buildings onto a plot of land that would have been the size of one garden for a home like this in earlier times. This tug between houses and space was to be a recurring theme on today’s ride. 

I locked my bike by the pond on the village green. It was a quiet morning and nobody was about. Village greens conjure peaceful imag- es of cricket matches, community celebrations and maypole dances. But historically, village greens were about more than recreation. Since the Middle Ages they have been an area of common grassland for the use of everyone, often with a pond where fish were reared, cartwheels soaked to prevent them shrinking, clothes washed, cattle watered, and dishonest traders punished on ducking stools as social humiliation. 

Completing today’s bucolic scene was an old flint-and-brick oast house. Buildings like these were once used to dry hops for brewing beer, so the distinctive conical shape is common in hop-growing areas. I set off along a narrow lane beneath an archway of hedges and trees. A notice pinned to a fence said ‘Do not feed horses no carrot or apple.’ Horses’ hooves had chewed the earth to sloppy mud, so I picked my way carefully down the edge. 

A red sign declaring ‘PRIVATE GROUNDS’ was nailed to an old 

Pigs 

beech tree on the edge of a copse. ‘NO THRU ACCESS’ read another. ‘PRIAVATE [sic]. NO PARKING. RESIDENTS ONLY’ warned a third. Even where there were footpaths, it felt as though they’d been allowed only grudgingly, with fences and cautionary signs keeping me strictly on the narrowest strip of land it was possible to walk on. It was a cheerless affair, a mean-spirited granting of minimal space. At one point the path became a claustrophobic tunnel between high fence panels that was barely wide enough for my shoulders. 

‘March, month of “many weathers”,’ grumbled John Clare, the peas- ant poet, and I thought of him as I sheltered from a shower beneath a church’s lychgate. Lych is derived from the Old English word lich, meaning corpse, and the lychgate was where a group bringing a body for burial would meet the priest. These were the mad March days of rain then sun then wind then rain then breakfast. I spent all of yester- day’s sunshine indoors, filling in tedious tax stuff for my accountant and looking forward to today’s outing. It was foolish to have expected that the weather today would still be mild. 

I was drawn by the distinct scent of fresh water. It’s such a fine, uplifting odour. ‘Long enough in the desert a man, like other animals, can learn to smell water,’ wrote the late Edward Abbey, American author and environmental activist, in Desert Solitaire. Far from a desert, across the railway tracks behind an industrial park, I found a misty, moody, monochrome fishing lake lined with rushes. 

A heron circled overhead, stately and assured. Black-and-white tufted ducks careened in, to land with a waterski skid. Coots drifted over the smooth surface. They always draw a wry reminiscence from me because a thousand lifetimes ago I studied the ‘agonistic commu- nication’ of coots for my university dissertation, whatever that means. But my heart had already clocked off from academia by then and I was getting ready to hit the road. I had requested to do my fieldwork in Africa, sniffing the opportunity to wangle an adventure out of a degree. But the professor was wise to my scheming and I was unceremoniously packed off to sit by a chilly Edinburgh duckpond for weeks, much like the one I’d discovered today. I smiled at my youthful disappointment 

and turned away from the coots.

This was a landmark day of the year: my first bike ride without wearing gloves. I woke to a softer, earlier, warmer sunrise and cycled out to a grid square that began on an overgrown heath of bracken, gorse and heather. It needed an auroch or two to control it. I continued into a wood whose highest branches swayed in the stiff breeze. I lay on my back and watched the twigs rattling against each other like squabbling fingers, snapping and cracking. There was a slight gap between each tree crown, like a mosaic. This ‘crown shyness’ is caused by the recip- rocal pruning I was watching and it helps trees to remain healthy and share resources. The spacing improves each tree’s access to light and can deter the spread of diseases, parasitic vines and leaf-eating insects.