When the birds took back the hills

just for the day

Friends,

I hope you had a peaceful year end. This week’s story follows on from my last piece - Quiet Illuminations. This is the time when many people announce new plans for the year, but as this is a space to slow down and rest in the peace of wild things I’m going to let things drift quietly at this time of evening candlelight and morning walks in the wintry woods.

If you’re a paid subscriber and you missed the link to my new e-book offering: Rima 1 - Essays and Interludes, I’ve made this available again here. From next week new or renewing paid subscribers will receive this at sign up as well as new printables of recent paintings.

Hope you enjoy the story.

J

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I’m writing this a few days after Christmas having walked for most of the morning in the woods and fields around Kington. I’ve just recovered from a virus caught from a family member which then lasted and lasted. I’m not sure if this particular virus has been more succesful than most because the last few days have been quieter than at any time since the first Covid 19 lockdown. The hills were all mine on Christmas day. The raptors had picked up on the human absence and they were out in force. I counted a group of 10 red kites on Bradnor Hill, all hanging, swooping and circling in perfect conditions, the wind gentle from the west. I’m sure they look forward to Christmas Day, the one day each year when the whirr and groan of machines is almost absent. The main road at the bottom of the hill was empty. The usual traffic, mostly trucks coming from the ridiculously misplaced quarry just over the border, was non-existent. There were no tractors in the fields, no planes in the sky. At one point I spotted a couple on Herrock Hill, half a mile away, walking along Offa’s Dyke. They seemed as affronted by my presence as I was by theirs and began to gesticulate, trying to shoo me away. Perhaps they are also Bird People.

I remember the quietness of a similar day up on the hill above the Wye Valley in March of 2020. At the time we were only allowed to walk a short distance from our homes. I’m not good at calculating distances, so I walked up the sunken lanes and bridleways to the hill common to look for curlews. Again, no cars, no tractors, the sky white and empty. Sheep had been moved into barns. Some farm gates had been boarded over so you couldn’t look into the adjoining fields. The birds enjoyed noise-free days, every day, for weeks. Curlews circled constantly over the little fields, chased each other around pools, swooped low over stone circles. They called so much that the air shivered. This made me a little anxious. It was obvious that the quiet would not last long and I was concerned that they’d nest in an exposed place on the common which could be easily disturbed once business as usual resumed. This, fortunately, did not happen.

The red kites on Bradnor Hill didn’t seem at all interested in my presence as I watched them sliding and dancing around me. At times they were so close I could see the glints in their ice blue eyes. You can watch us, human, as long as you keep quiet. A little further to the north, where the land slopes steeply down into the valley, bracken and gorse lies thick on the hillside. Over this tangled growth a kestrel was hunting. I’ve seen it many times here, it must be a good hunting ground. As usual I tried to sneak closer to it as it hovered and as usual it let me get a little closer then swooped away. A raven flew past and picked on one of the kites, which it managed to chase off. It returned to harass the kestrel for a time, but the little hawk was unintimidated. It flickered, looped, twisted and always outmanoeuvred the bigger bird, which got bored quickly and swooped away. The raptors continued their silent dance.

I’ve been dipping in and out of George Borrow’s classic book: Wild Wales, often wondering why he chose the word “wild” for its title. As far as I can tell the book is mostly a self-congratulatory account of his philological gifts and an admonishment to the Welsh people he met who either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak their own language to him. How little wildness there seemed to be even then in Victorian Wales, though at that time there were certainly more woods. The fields were obviously worked by hand in those times and therefore rural areas were densely populated. Borrow never seems to go far without bumping into a cottage full of natives. Wales was a place much visited by the English middle classes at the time. The more photogenic places seem to have been as busy then as they are now. At one point Borrow strolls up Snowdon with his wife, visits the cafe at the top, and strolls back down again, all in a four hour period (this writer was in a hurry!).

A section of the book about the Welsh Borders struck me. Borrow was walking in the Wrexham area and there he described not a rural idyll, but a rapidly scaling industrial landscape dominated by machines. As he walks he encounters groups of people carrying huge lumps of coal on their shoulders. Darkness falls and the hills are ablaze with foundries working through the night, flames shooting out of them “as high as church steeples.” Though the sky is cloudy and moonless he can clearly see the creases in his own hands, stained red from the fire glow. The sound of owls is replaced by hammers, chains, blast furnaces. The coal field in that area was exploited hugely in the following years and one of the UK’s worst mining disasters occured there in the 1930s. 261 men were killed in an undergound explosion at the mechanised mine at Gresford. Most of the bodies are still down there.

I’m also working my way through Barry Lopez’s late masterpiece: Horizon. In his account of assisting an archeological dig on Skraeling Island he contemplates the deep silence of the arctic. “On some days the only sounds I heard between breakfast and supper were the voices of birds and the sharp explosions - like pistol shots - of stranded sheets of ice fracturing along the shore as the tide went out.” Near to the end of the expedition he walks to the remains of an ancient Thule settlement, abandoned centuries ago. He takes with him the little cassette player he often listens to in his tent at night and decides to play Beethoven’s 9th symphony to the ghosts of the place. Soon after starting the music though he feels a deep sense of shame. He turns the little machine off and lets the ancient settlement return to its long silence. He remembers how far our civilisation and its noise have reached across the earth and does not want to extend it further, even to play one of the greatest pieces of art ever created. The peace of the wild is a sacred requirement.

This sense of shame happens to me sometimes. I occasionally take headphones with me when I go walking. Listening to music helps silence the inner chatter - my annoying companions. But there’s a cost, a cutting off of the place itself. Listening to music furthers the reach of the thing I’m trying to get away from. So, the headphones get plucked off my ears, I apologise to the birds, and I walk on.

I’m perfectly happy to admit that I’m grateful for technology. I have no luddite tendencies at all, no desire to live in the woods or on a remote island full time. Having lived most of my life in cities I don’t have the first idea how to survive in these landscapes. I can’t even grow a vegetable and don’t have a garden. But I’m concerned about the reach of technology, how it seems to pervade every part of our lives and affects the lives of the other-than-human beings around us. I believe there should be islands where the tech isn’t allowed, islands in space and in time. We could start with machine free days when we walk away from the clatter, roar, rattle and hum for a time. If you want to experience what these days would be like just climb a hill on Christmas Day and wait for the birds to arrive, and with them the quiet of the wild.