a rock to stand on: Walking the Apocalypse.

Still building this post. Bear with me. Should be ready in a day or so.

Walking the Apocalypse

Coping with Covid-19

I count myself lucky, these days, to live in a small market town with direct access to the countryside where I can walk for hours every day if I wish and never see another soul. With the coming of the Coronavirus and the lockdown in the UK, I began taking regular walks, exploring the local footpaths and trails. At the beginning of April I posted an account of one of these walks on facebook and was surprised by the amount of positive feedback I received, so I did another, and then a third. People started sending requests for more until gradually my occasional posts turned into a blog. A friend in Georgia suggested the title and it took off from there. After the first post I began to take my camera with me and record the coming of spring in the North Hertfordshire countryside.

Spring is here in Hitchin.

Here are the first four blogs posts.

Thursday 2nd April 2020

I'm kicking myself that I decided not to take a camera on my walk today over the fields. Up by West Wood I came across a herd of young deer. Deer are not a particularly unusual sight around here. What was unusual was the size of the herd. I counted at least 65 individual animals. There were probably a lot more as they were running two and three abreast and I was unable to spot them all. They ran directly across my path only ten yards in front of me, emerging from a gap in the hedgerow into the open cornfield. They were badly spooked. That didn't surprise me. Earlier in the day, as I walked up Tatmorehills Lane, I almost stumbled across two guys lying on their stomachs under cover of the hedge and squinting into the sights of rifles with silencers. Given their Barbour jackets and tweed caps I took them to be farmers. The early corn crops (that's wheat and barley if you are American) are coming up now with the milder weather and deer love them at this time of year. A few minutes after seeing the herd, I heard the loud phut, phut of rifle fire. The hedgerows are now white and frothy with blackthorn blossom, and the fields around West Wood are thick with pheasants, but there are no hares this year. Usually the big open fields around the wood are full of them, all going crazy, careering up and down as hares do at this time. I'm told that myxomatosis has skipped species from rabbits to hares, so their absence is worrying. I did see a couple later on near Cornelius Wood, and Chalk Hill, which cheered me up. I'm rather fond of hares.

Hitchin in April

April Blossom and Holy Saviour Church, Hitchin

Ransom's Rec. Community Garden

Walking the Apocalypse

Thursday 9th April 2020

People seemed to like my last walking post, so I'm writing up another, and since I remembered to take my camera with me this time, I have some photos to share. I walked out to Pirton today through Cadwell and Ickleford, and came back over the fields to Westmill then home via Oughton Head, a distance of about ten miles. In the space of three hours I saw at least five people. Since the lockdown, it's getting like Piccadilly Circus. But spring is definitely springing up all around The blackthorn is frosting the hedges with blossom, and even the hawthorn is out too in some places.

Hanbury Lane, between Ickleford and Pirton

I didn't see any deer on this walk - they tend not to be found this side of Hitchin - but I did run into a couple of highland cattle having a boss fight on Oughton Common

Two Highland Cattle on Oughton Common

It might be my imagination, but wherever I go out the birds seem to be singing more enthusiastically than usual. I'm starting to feel like I'm the intruder now, venturing into their world. They are no longer just an attractive backdrop to mine. I reached the common as evening was falling. The crows were flocking together in the skies and settling down to roost with their raucous whistley cries. I love that sound. As a child I lived in a house on the edge of a village surrounded by woods and spinneys. There were several huge rookeries in the nearby trees. I went to sleep every evening listening to their calls. As the skies over the common darkened they became full of bats, and I had to step carefully to avoid frogs socialising on the paths. I usually time my walks so that I get back into town when the night is coming on and there are few people around. The big show this evening was a spectacular lunar eclipse. As I came down Grays Lane, the moon was round and full and a gorgeous deep peachy colour. My camera unfortunately was unwilling to be convinced, and it turns out rather pale in all my photos.

Lunar eclipse over Grays Lane, Hitchin

Saturday 11th April 2020

In the early 1970s, I took a small flat in Holborn, in the dead centre of London. I was 23, full of hormones and looking for excitement in the big city. It was a disaster. Within weeks I was having nightmares. In them I'd be running up and down endless escalators or frantically climbing over concrete walls looking for a green field. After six months I left The Smoke and came back home to North Hertfordshire, relieved. I did try living in other cities after that, but it never worked out. Now, with Covid-19 on the rampage, I'm glad that I live in a small market town where I can get out into the isolation of the countryside. If the 'government' limit our movement further as they are threatening, then at least I have access to a couple of nearby parks.. I was going to restrict myself to posting photos once a week. Self-discipline, however, has never been my strong suit and I had such a great time today walking around Hitchin's green spaces that I couldn't resist sharing a few more. My route around town was one that Di and I used to take regularly back in the day. It avoids crowded pavements and passes through most of the town's parks. Celandines and forget-me-nots, are bursting out now in Ransom's Rec. Community Garden and all along the river path to Cadwell. Here and there, I even saw the odd bluebell poking through the loam, and one solitary orchid. Spotted Woodpeckers were hammering at the trees by the river and I'm pretty sure I heard a green woodpecker calling in the distance. As I was taking a photograph of the culverts which carry the Hiz and Purwell rivers under Grove Road, a small bird came and posed for me on the dividing wall. I thought it was a greenfinch at first but now that I look at the photo, I'm not so sure. In Walsworth Common, I came upon woman gathering Jack-by-the-Hedge (Hedge garlic). When I asked how she was going to use it, she told me that she was going to make a pesto. I can stay away from other people in the parks and out in the countryside, but undoing the latches on gates poses a problem. (The virus hangs around on metal for up to three days.) I pondered this one for a while, and thought about bringing a soapy spray with me, then realised that the simplest solution is to avoid the gate altogether and climb over the adjacent fence. Much more fun. On Windmill Hill, I met another guy with a camera, trying to get the same shot as me. We had a deliciously British conversation, whingeing about everything we could think of, but most particularly about the 'government'; a word I am writing in inverted commas these days. (Better still if HMG went away altogether, but hey, that's a different blog.) The need for 'social distancing' however, has brought out a lot of unBritishness in the British. It's forcing us to be more aware of one another. To cope with this outrage, or to deal with the embarrassment we seem to be smiling and talking to each other more. We even start a conversation now and then. Strangers have even been heard asking each other how they are coping with the lockdown. We soon revert to type though. I had to queue yesterday for the supermarket. (They were only letting people in one at a time to maintain 'social distancing'.) There were about 100 people in the queue, patiently standing two meters apart in almost total silence for an hour and a half. Someone in the Grove Road area is putting up notices on walls and railings. Attached to the notices are little strips of paper, each with a word written on it like, 'courage', 'good humour' 'friendship' and so on. The notices say: "please take what you need". Over the last few days all the strips have disappeared, except the one which says 'passion'. Not a British thing evidently. Be cheerful folks.

Monday 13th April 2020
No walking today. April showers were my excuse, and a desire to lie in bed till 4 o'clock in the afternoon reading Agatha Christie novels. I'd never read anything by her until a year ago, and them immediately fell for the charm of her writing. She's not a great stylist, but her writing has a naturally flowing and unaffected manner, so that reading her is like floating down a quiet stream on a spring day. It's effortless, almost not like reading at all. And her plots are fiendishly clever. Reading her detective novels is so enjoyable in itself that I don't really care whodunnit. I'm happy to let Poirot or Miss Marple tell me in the last chapter.

Yesterday was a real spring day, so calm that time seemed to float by like dandelion clocks drifting over the meadows. It's not often in adult life that moments like that return to capture some of the unconscious freedom of childhood. So, I had to get out for a walk. But which way to go? There are so many tracks and footpaths around Hitchin that it is sometimes difficult to choose. In recent days I've been setting out frequently in the direction of Ransoms Rec and the river path to Cadwell. It provides a green corridor out into open country from the bottom of my street without my having to go into town. That's they route I took yesterday too. But there was another reason. I've been waiting for some good light to get a photograph of the Ickleford willow plantation. It always looks a little grey and drab unless there is some evening sunlight slanting across the stream to catch the the boles of the trees and bring them alive.

It wasn't a long walk, just to Cadwell and Ickleford, then over the fields to Westmill, before coming back at evening by Ducklands and the town centre. After dark, the town centre is spookily deserted in these days of lockdown. It's a lonely experience, walking among familiar buildings in the chill air of night, while the only sounds are those of my own footfalls echoing off the walls andthe striking of the church clock telling the quarter hours.

There's little ground-living wildlife to be seen out beyond Cadwell (if you except teenagers with spray cans making their mark on the world), but in just three days since I last came this way, leaf buds have appeared on many of the trees and more and more plants are coming into flower. I like eccentric plants like butterbur which flower before they produce their leaves. I watch out for them every year in the damp and marshy places they like so much. And there they were all along the side of the Hiz, their sturdy flower heads poking out from among the other foliage which they will soon overwhelm with their enormous leaves.

I stopped for a while where the river runs under the railway bridge on the main east coast line from London to Edinburgh. Sometimes if you are lucky and you stand quietly here, you can catch the blue flash of a kingfisher darting along the length of the river. But today I had another reason to stop and ponder: which river is it? The bridge lies half a mile downstream from confluence of two chalk streams, the Hiz and the Purwell. But which is the main stream and which is the tributary? Is this then the Hiz or the Purwell? No one seems to know. The Ordnance Survey map says it's the Hiz; Google maps and the plaque attached to the bridge above my head seemed to think it was the Purwell. One thing I noticed, however, was that the river itself was bubbling along happily. It didn't seem to have identity issues. The weighty mattedr of the river's name should perhaps be left for the learned debates of philosophers or the political wrangling of town surveyors. I'm happy to go with the Purwell on this one. Or is it the Hiz?

I hadn't been past Gerry's Hole for a few years and, on an impulse made a side-trip up to the nearby embankment and took a look. Not a lot had changed in that time. The Hole is a tree-lined pit, excavated a hundred years ago for material to build the now dismantled Hitchin to Bedford railway. The Hole is not very big, but it's deep and full of stagnant water, its green scumminess broken here and there only by the rotting hulks of fallen trees. The spot is both fascinating and repellent. I stood on its slippery banks for several minutes weighted down with some heavy thoughts. It has that effect on the mind.

Gerry was a 'old boy' of the nearby village of Ickleford who, by legend, was walking home after a night's heavy drinking. Being seven sheets to the wind he stumbled into the Hole and was drowned. Who Gerry was exactly has long been forgotten. What pleasures he took in life and what sadnesses befell him we can only imagine, but his name lives on here in this unlovely place. His death, as often as not, is memorialised by the presence of a few discarded beer cans floating among the Hole's fallen branches and matted weed.