You can't take the boy
Some days are peerless. Shafting light through trees holding the last burnished leaves of autumn, the sliding shadows of dark on sunlit downland. Of these are memories made.
I had to go across country to do a job of work, and even though the job itself had a large hint of tedium, it was the getting there that counted. Raised in the hills, living in the flatlands of the east has its moments when there is a pang.
Greensand and chalklands have their undulations, their fronts, their surging woodlands draped across comely curves. I had to drive through these from the open east to the chilterns and beyond. The move from clay vales to scarps was abrupt. The first greensand front was marked by a windy road, and a vista of stately houses, their lime avenues sweeping upwards, tickled here and there with mistletoe.
I passed one of those cottages that just ticks very box, plus one. On the edge of a venerable estate, it is tucked down a minor lane, fronted by victorian railings, cocooned in a time lapse scene of a century more ago. Thirty years before it was very much down at heel. Isolated, unloved, somehow being absorbed by the woods on one side, and a spreading marsh on another. It seemed to be evaporating, as the first of the tiles on the pegged roof obeyed the seductions of the ground below.
Working far away, i could but watch its decline. Then, it was bought, and painstakingly restored. Sharp, but quickly aging again, it yelled then settled quietly into the background. The fate of the old estate kennels just across the way was less happy. The roof was stripped, felted, then left to the elements. There is no such thing as a benign balance. As the years have passed, so has the condition of the roof. The first rip, exposing the boarding , was slow. Within the last three months that rip has become a chasm, and with it the life being.
Beyond that cottage, the lane wore its way round the curves of the hills, woods tucked coyly into the folds. Plantations that I saw new are now strapping oaks, and the muddy rents in the gateways are the legacy of timber lorries with their felled cousins.
Back again into the clay vales and a line of shadowed scarp crenulations. Each woodland had its own black echoes in a sharp sun. Seemingly each and every one had its red kite swirling lazily above. To think that I was in charge of that reintroduction programme some 30+ years ago. Every time I tick another is to see a success- not a common word in conservation and landscapes.
Closing in on the small town near where I once lived was to remind me of change. The holloways were still here, the lakes too, and the hangers. But of the town itself? The honest shops are now decked out in 'distressed' patinas, where the sweat of agriculture has passed from Fordson and Fergies to Chelsea tractors in the hilly high street. A coffee shop called 'black goo' seems without irony to have replaced the leather supplier and saddler, and the mucky farm famed for its slurry has become Marks' Farm- home to a bijou micro brewery, with the cleanest yard I've ever seen.
In spite of it all, the hills made the heart sing as I cut through in a slice of wood. You can take a boy out of the hills, but you can't take the hills out of the boy. Returning in a few days to the moors of the north will reinforce that with a vengeance.