The Walking Landscape

Walking is a pastime which I have always engaged in with great pleasure and, over the years, with a growing sense of mindfulness. Many a walker may agree that it is the easiest way to meditate: to root oneself in the moment by tuning into the sights, sounds and smells of the landscape and to appreciate its changes throughout a day or from one day to the next, or seasonally.

Walking is definitively human, or hominine. From the time several millions of years ago that Africa tore itself apart to form the Rift Valley, stranding our Australopithecine ancestors in an increasingly treeless landscape, walking became an essentially bipedal necessity of adaptation and natural selection. They thought and walked and somehow survived against overwhelming odds, developing an increasingly confident, upright gait as they did so. Before the invention of the wheel or the domestication of beasts of burden, everything was done with two feet in touch with the ground.

A mindful walker can find that through participating mindfully in any given moment, one can become a part of the living landscape and return to Mother Nature. Not only can one react to the things which stimulate one's senses; those things also react to your presence in a place: the persecuted Magpie is usually the first to take flight upon our approach, whereas the Robin may be of a roughly opposite persuasion. Insects evade capture as a shadow brushes past them. These are roles played out step by step in an unfolding drama.

I believe that walking, above all other modes of locomotion, roots the pedestrian within a landscape in a fluid, progressive state, regardless of an urban or rural setting. Many would agree that riding a horse or bicycle offers a similar sense of rootedness, but walking makes known an opportunity to give one's senses over completely to what is before and around you, more so than all other modes of transport, which require a part of the mind to be given over to driving. Spiritually, we follow a path. The destination is not as important as we might think it is - progress is made simply by following the path.

Walking offers an intimacy which weaves together the light, the sounds, smells, feelings and sights of the enveloping landscape into a sensual tapestry. There is an excitement in exposing oneself to the elements, to leave behind the convenience, the luxury and the safety of modern life and return to that primitive state. Walking is rhythmic, melodious. Walking inspires pure thought, clarity of mind, imagination and creativity.

I am no peripatetic philosopher. Most writers could present you with a more eloquent, articulate manifesto championing the benefits of walking over other means of locomotion. I am a wanderer who feels that walking, when it is possible to choose to walk, ignites something in one's imagination which is otherwise sleepwalking within or in a state of suspended animation during a journey by car or public transport. The vehicle accelerates its passengers, and isolates the commuter, taking away the possibility to join with the landscape and to contextualise the role one might play in the landscape as it speeds past in a long chain of lost opportunities.

Hilaire Belloc, in his 1906 work Hills and the Sea, expressed this feeling perfectly: "The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities. And as to the method of doing this, we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly against servants and flattery); but the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all".

Driving through a landscape we are, at best, only forming an abstract connection with it. We retreat into a part of our consciousness and often do not remember how we get from point to point, even though we have safely navigated past cyclists, through traffic signals, around roundabouts and stopped or slowed as necessity demanded. We may safely navigate a car across a landscape, but we are not really a part of it in the way we are on perhaps a bicycle or horse, but especially so on foot.

To intimately know a landscape changes the manner in which one passes through it. One might walk on or over an unfamiliar landscape, rather than in or amongst it. A familiar landscape shares its secrets. The Downs are my landscape; I know them and to walk upon them is like returning home. Walking into one's home is to return to familiar, beloved surroundings. The Downland landscape is my home and my companion which allows me into its welcoming embrace. One is enveloped into its folds and combes and dry valleys, and then the landscape unfolds with the progression of each footfall and its secrets are revealed.

A voice whispers in the ear of the familiar walker: "Welcome back, friend. Come, walk with me and I will share with you my secrets". And everywhere then you share the joy of nature, such as in watching Small Tortoiseshell butterflies basking in the March sun by their rabbit-hole hibernaculum; a joy punctuated by the pain of tragic, brutal lives cut short when a dead fox or rabbit or pheasant is revealed before it has met the gaze of the crow or magpie or, increasingly, the red kite.

For a time, whether it may be for the duration of a single walk or for a lifetime, I am a part of this landscape, as it is at all times a part of my inner landscape. That landscape is changed because of my presence within it and, returning home to the place where I have put down my roots, I too am changed, always for the better.

The downland landscape from Swanborough towards Firle (© Steven Teale)

Secrets of a small rookery, part one: Common Ground

Humans often seem to share a negative emotion when it comes to the crow family: indifference, mistrust, fear, dislike or even hatred. Where do these emotions come from? Are they inherent or acquired - weaved into our cultural DNA? The corvids are, to me, the most appealing and fascinating of bird families; the Rook is my favourite.

One of the things which makes rooks a favourite bird is that they stick around; they are constant, ancient and as much a part of the landscape as the Downs themselves. When one thinks Rook, one should also think rootedness. Like their trees, Rooks are rooted in the landscape. Many rookeries have existed longer than living memory - those which have avoided the axe and chainsaw. I have been told that many rookeries are ancient. When the Romans looked fearfully upon Silva Anderida and, later, the Saxons towards Andredsweald - the ancient, seemingly endless, impenetrable southern woodland - the eastern extent of the Sussex Downs remained treeless and formed an open spit of land between the trees and the sea, and possibly had been this way since the tundra retreated north at the end of the ice age, when mud and melt-water carved dykes and plugged valleys. These are the high, open vistas chosen by the Neolithic tribes to bury their kinfolk in the tumuli which punctuate the hills today.

I fancy that the rooks took root soon after those first post-ice age trees, watched by the first hunters, foragers and farmers, flying out of those ancient leaves and onto the ancient turf doing then the same that we can watch them do today and what they will continue to do for as long as the trees and the turf remain neighbourly.

What did those ancient birds think of us plundering their resources? What did they call us for doing so?

Late-February is a good time of year to begin watching rooks.  One might possess a keen eye for them year-round, yet spy on them with an enhanced interest from about mid-February. They are waiting to begin the nest-building season. From my office window in Lewes I am blessed with an almost nest-eye view of the thirty five-odd pairs which cluster together with Jackdaws in the tops of the tallest trees, apparently waiting for some circadian rhythm to pulse, to pass unseen to human eyes as we struggle along in our frantic races. I call these birds the Southover Rookery.

The Southover Rookery in February - the nests seen were built during the warmest, most confusing December on record

The rooks stoop against late winter rains, hanging from the treetops like great black drips of water, waiting. Taking flight as winter gales roar through the trees, they bend flat-backed into the wind and, with an efficiency of effort, launch away with wings bent like cupid's bow, gliding and wheeling in numbers behind a well-fed kinsman to its happy hunting ground to plunder the worms with their bald faces pressed deep into the turf.

They are fierce birds and, to the Buzzard, they are legion. I have seen no bird stand up to them, yet their smaller Jackdaw cousins are tolerated, bullied, integrated separately but within the rookery. But it is still called 'The Rookery' wherever the two birds are present.

One of the more ironic aspects of watching an urban parliament is that the signs showing the start of nest-building are underfoot on the paving when one walks beneath the turmoil above: thousands of fallen twigs cast like runes on the paving appear in a sudden shower. Look down to understand what is afoot above. We have taken their land and paved it, but they treat it like any other woodland floor. 

For a week or two prior to this the birds sit in the trees, newly paired, and tenderly and quietly occupy the fork of the branch upon which they will construct their nest of twigs and raise their young. As I observe from the office windows, I see one of the pair hop clumsily along the bough to a twig and grasp it between its bill, tearing and tugging it loose, hop back to its mate, but avoiding the lunge of its hostile neighbours. This raucous bird now shows its tender side; together they assess the suitability of the twig as nest material, eye it closely, place it on the fork of the bough. The twig falls, but balances precariously on a lower branch; the owner hops down to where it comes to rest, collects it, returns to the nest-site, repeats its work. The twig falls again, but this time to the road below, littering the pavement.

The following day the birds can be entirely absent. But the very beginning of a proto-nest has appeared in the crook of a bough. Another is close by. They are where I observed the two pairs the previous day. Does this mean they have staked their claim to the tree? Is it now their right in rook-law to return at their leisure and be assured of their place? Dominant above subordinate. Whatever purpose it may serve, a strong wind at this early stage can wipe the trees clean of incomplete nests.

Proto-nests

Proto-nests

The waiting recommences. The pavement may be more or less bare in the morning as I walk into the office and littered with twigs at lunchtime, or I may walk out of work in the evening on a clear path only to return the next morning to the spectacle. From this time of year I begin to pace back and forth expectantly beneath the rookery, looking up; and the sign that it has started is always so clear that one could literally trip over it and, when one does, it has begun.

Above, the birds fly in straight spoke-like lines, chessboard straight, back and forth repeatedly to and from the hub, swooping low over the rooftops with twigs snapped off trees in the gardens at Pelham House and Southover Grange, the Convent Field, the Priory ruins, the Dripping Pan where their namesakes play football, the Railway Land and anywhere else arboreal. Their nests are built from scratch and they appear to prefer green wood to brittle deadwood. Each year, without fail, after the nests begin to take shape, each bird begins to take an interest in their neighbours' nests. Like all the corvid species, the rook is both intelligent and observant. After a while temptation gets the better of it and, while its neighbours are away, it steals a twig from their nest for its own. Time and energy saved! Then it takes another. After a few thefts its own nest is plundered by another observant bird who has cottoned onto the caper. The scheme, the rookery, quickly descends into a melee with pairs of birds screaming from their own nest in defence while attempting to steal from the others, clattering through the trees. The cacophony, the comedy, is an annual rite that I rejoice in whenever I see it.

Throughout the winter, when the previous year's fledglings are shocked by the stark truth that endless autumn days and harvest gleanings are finite, the flock seems subdued. They still wheel and cavort across the sky, mob the buzzard and bully the jackdaws, but they are clearly waiting for something. Today, though, they are nowhere near and I too must wait.