The winter thrushes had come. I liked the idea that while our summer visitors had headed off to Africa, these birds had flown all the way from the Arctic Circle and elected to spend their winters here on my hillside. They came and went through the winter; I kept thinking they were gone for good, and then they were back again in force. Scores of fieldfares, big, brash and noisy, fell from the trees to the ground and back again. The redwings, neat little birds with a glorious blood-red flash beneath their wings, were in their hundreds in the open fields. They worked their way steadily across their chosen field, all heads facing the same way.
I was walking down the track one day, watching the redwings feeding down the hill from me, when I was met by a quad bike being ridden by the farmer’s niece who helped out on the farm occasionally. She pulled up and stopped for a chat. Looking out over the valley below to the far hills she said what a fine view I had up here. I commented that the landscape here was beautiful. I wouldn’t really know about that, she said, and shrugged. I’ve never lived anywhere else. She would be marrying soon. I could see the farm she was moving to from here; she pointed it out to me. It was across the valley, only two or three miles distant, but it might as well have been another country. This would be the last time that I saw her. The farmer, her uncle, had also spent every night of his life on this hillside. He had never been to England, not thirty miles away as the crow flies. He went to Cardiff once, to get his teeth fixed. Didn’t like it.
While we were talking, something slipped out of the pine woods above us, a streak of slaty grey hurtling straight towards us just an inch or two above the ground, following every undulation in the hillside. Just when it looked like collision was inevitable, it swerved around us at the last possible moment, picked up speed and crashed into the redwings feeding below. The male sparrowhawk had just used us as cover for hunting. He had passed within a foot of the farmer’s niece, and she hadn’t even noticed him.
These were hungry times. It wasn’t long before I saw the sparrowhawk making another kill. He skated down my track from the top of Penlan Wood, and passed between the posts of the open gate towards a little flock of cock chaffinches that were feeding unaware in the field at the edge of the oak wood. At the last moment they saw him racing towards them just above the ground and lifted for the safety of the trees. The hawk flipped upwards and executed a perfect backwards roll, and when he landed on the grass there was a chaffinch seized in his talons. He stood there immobile for a few seconds as though thinking, but was in fact squeezing the life out of the bird with the force of his grasp. It seems harsh but it’s a quick death. Only when his prey was still and lifeless did he begin to pluck it. Hawks prefer their prey on the ground, while most falcons specialize in birds on the wing. A peregrine will stoop on its prey from a great height and at incredible speed, killing it on impact.
I would go out walking every day, without fail, whatever the weather. With eyes wide open I never came back disappointed. There was always something new to see; not a new species necessarily as there were only so many here to be seen, but behaviour I had never seen before, or something I had overlooked, or simply something beautiful. There was more out there than you could ever learn. If nowhere else, I would at least take a stroll down to my postbox; it was a pleasant short walk for a bad day. Down the front fields along the edge of Penlan Wood and between the old hollow oaks below. Through the gate at the bottom of the field was a crook barn, one of the oldest buildings on the estate, overhung by a row of sycamores. The barn was constructed from huge curved beams split from the trunk of an oak perhaps five hundred years ago and looked like the upturned hull of a galleon. I always peeked inside, and often there would be a tawny owl sleeping in the rafters. The place was dilapidated now, collapsing on to the rusting old farm machinery inside, though one end had been fixed up into a byre for the few cows and the pair of ponies that were kept in these fields. The fields here were steep, rocky and overgrown, no good for sheep, and wooded with oak and alder.
Down through the woods was the stream, and a crumbling stone bridge, with a keystone dating it to 1839. There was once a cart track that followed this stream all the way to the river from the hills, but it was impassable now, overgrown with brambles, bisected with fallen trees, or simply washed away. I walked upstream along what remained of the track. The dingle was deep and dark and heavily wooded, and the stream tumbled below me, one waterfall after another. Perhaps there would be a party of long-tailed tits bounding from tree to tree, swinging from slender twigs like acrobats, their tails longer than their bodies, with their camp followers behind them, treecreepers and goldcrests. The goldcrests are the smallest of all our birds. In the summer they hide away in the plantations but in the winter they emerge and somehow manage to survive its hardships. Perhaps I would see a sparrowhawk skimming the treetops, surfing the canopy in search of the flocks of siskins that fed on the alder cones. And that was enough.
Finally I came to a gate, and there by the gatepost was my postbox. I say postbox, but it was actually an old ten-gallon whitewash drum salvaged from my woodshed, perched on a couple of breeze-blocks, its lid kept on with a boulder. This was the point at which the lanes came closest to me; they went on to three more farmhouses, then petered out altogether. There was a bridge here too, in far better repair than my forgotten bridge in the woods. Come the spring, the grey wagtails would be nesting in a niche in this bridge. If I had any post I would sit on the wall of the bridge, swing my heels over the gushing stream below, and read my letters there.
If it was pouring with rain, I would make do with my trip to the postbox; I could make it there and back in little over half an hour if I rushed. But usually I would spin out my walk for an hour or two longer. In winter I tended to stay low, where there was a modicum of shelter. Most often I retraced my steps along the old cart track by the stream, back to the lost bridge. Squirrels would be chasing each other, skittering through the trees. At the bridge the stream divided into two around a rocky island. Long ago a massive oak had fallen, across both branches of the stream, island and all. Its moss-covered trunk was just a racetrack for the squirrels now, a short cut from bank to bank. Out of the four-foot-wide stump of the fallen oak grew an almost full-sized beech tree, the only beech in this wood. Before I was even born a jay had brought its prize here and secreted the seed of a beech in the crown of the oak, cached for the winter. But the jay had never returned, lost to a sparrowhawk perhaps, and the beech had taken root and grown into the hollow heart of the oak, finally bursting it open.
Over the fern-draped, crumbling masonry of this bridge was a magical world. A whole row of fields here had been bought up long ago, only to be abandoned. The first of these was completely encircled by woods, it was like a forest clearing. It was boggy and waterlogged now, the grass grew in waist-high tussocks, and it was being invaded by bracken and scrub, mostly birch, always the first on the scene. In spring this field would be filled with common spotted orchids, the only place I ever found them here. The woods on the far side of the field were a jungle of impene-trable scrub and rhododendrons that teemed with life. Badger trails emerged from under the scrub and spread across the field in every direction, but I never managed to trace them back to their sett hidden somewhere within the wall of vegetation. There were more abandoned fields downstream beyond the alder woods to the east of this clearing, just as unkempt but more exposed. The farmhouse looked out over some of these fields, and it must have been hard for the farmer to be confronted daily by land so blatantly in need of sheep.