Home Again

3 Lapwings
3 Buzzards
2 Mallards
2 Whitethroats
1 Egyptian goose
1 Marsh tit
1 Chiff chaff
1 Nuthatch

It's a scrap of typical arable countryside, but it feels more like home than anywhere. I know it intimately: every ragged clump of scrub; every stag-headed oak. My memories live here. I'm reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen, and one particular passage stands out:

When people talk of 'knowing' or 'belonging' somewhere, this is what they mean. Familiarity comes with the overlaying of our experiences, memories and stories: there's the stretch of river where the mayfly rose; that's the owls' nesting tree; these hedgerows were once the boundaries of enclosure. We project all we are and all we know onto landscape. And, if we're open to it, the landscape projects back into us. Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and meshing that can feel a bit like love. In the drowsy light of the coming evening I not only see where I've walked before, but who I was when I talked there. What I was feeling, what I was thinking. And isn't this how we navigate this sphere? Creating fusions of human and place, attaching meaning and emotions, drawing cognitive maps that make sense of the realm beyond our comprehension?

To truly connect with a landscape, to call it home, is to imbue it with memory; and I would agree, it is more than a little like being in love. At a scrubby junction I recall the section of concrete tubing that I used to sit on, and which is now consumed by bramble. Just beyond is the paddock which used to be fenced. I was here with a neighbour once, and she told me to touch it. That was my first experience of electric-fence shock. A field nearby, and a time not so long ago: mid-winter, and I'm tracking a flock of finches, hoping to see if there might be bramblings among them; but each time I approach them they fly over to an opposite hedge. A medium oak standing at the corner of a field marks the limit of a walk I often took with my aunt, and this is the tree that taught me about acorns. Even the sky holds memory: here is a view that reminds me of the little planes that used to fly above, and which rarely seem to now.

I don't have a computer here. I don't watch the television. Instead, I walk. The city is distant and irrelevant. Unashamedly, I talk to myself. I wonder aloud at the earthworks that might signify ancient woodland. I spot, for the first time, a marsh tit (a misnomer, as it's most often found in broadleaved wooodland), a bird I've probably seen before without realising, and which can be distinguished from the other tits by its more distinctive call, which sounds like a sneeze: pit-choo. I watch a chiff chaff delineate its territory, its familiar echoing call one of the first I ever learnt as a child, and I see myself at ten or eleven, walking by Stockings' Wood, enchanted with the possibility of seeing something secret. A chiff chaff was singing then, too. Close by, in a hawthorn hedge, robins fight. Pheasants chuck-chuck in alarm, bursting suddenly from dense thickets of hazel and blackthorn. If any sound defines this place, it is the pheasant. The first wild animal I ever heard, in bed at night, was a pheasant. It was wild and frightening, and I had to be reassured. On my night walk here in Suffolk, the only birds I hear are woodpigeons and pheasants, the latter echoing over the fields as first one, then two, then half a dozen, call to each other, forming an invisible network in the black air. They know where I am, and they know where they are, but I'm blind.

It's here that my depression is most likely to lift. I'm free to wander, to consider plants, to listen out for rarer birds, to meditate on the landscape. I spend almost an hour in the wood; I sit on a branch, watching a nuthatch inspect the ash. The trees here all look similar: tall and straight, with few lateral branches near the ground, and it's easy to mistake the oaks for ash at first glance, as they assume the same habit. At some point, and suddenly, the coppicing stopped, and the ash shot up, forcing the oak to follow suit in pursuit of light. The birds all stay high, and this, and the lofty atmosphere, makes their calls echo more than usual. The lack of structural diversity limits the species that can thrive here, however; for the most part they are great- and blue-tits. There is nobody here to stare. Nobody tells me to get off their land. I can go where I like, and can be sure that I probably won't see anybody else. 

In the sky, lapwings call their strange, digital song, flapping almost clumsily, close to the ground. Skylarks rise high, hovering. It is the freedom, and the minutiae of this landscape and its embedded memories, that allows me to be myself.

   

Lapwings above a wheat field