Tag: North Downs diary

The orchids in need of fungi 🍄

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In June I did a long walk in the Surrey Hills around the famous Box Hill. The North Downs are absolutely fantastic walking country, being so easily accessible from London via public transport, and having some of the UK’s rarest wildlife, along with dramatic hilly landscapes and views.

The human (as well as the natural) history of the North Downs is incredible, with much of the North Downs Way coalescing with the Pilgrims Way.

Early on in this walk, I happened upon an area of yew trees and spotted some chicken of the woods growing. It’s always a nice thing to see.

Lured in by the sight of the fungus, I then found a massive dryad’s saddle growing like a gramophone from a beech tree. This is a fairly common larger fungus to find in June. It’s a summer woodland species.

Having moved round to look at the ridiculous gramophone fungus, I spotted what looked like dead growths of a wildflower or maybe a garden plant that had been dumped. After a minute or so I realised it was in fact a type of orchid: bird’s nest.

This isn’t a species I had ever seen before. It certainly wasn’t at its ‘best’, even though it lacks the colourfulness of other species nearby like common spotted or pyramidal orchids. There’s a really good reason for that.

It has a dependency on fungi. Its lack of cholorophyll is because it receives its food from fungi in the soil, which is also in relation to the roots of trees. The orchids were growing under yew but with beech in close proximity. It’s just another reminder of the role that fungi play in maintaining diverse ecosystems.

Away from the orchids, June is a good time to find chicken of the woods. We’ve had a very hot and dry spring/summer in southern England, and along the trail I noticed that a lot of the chicken had collapsed in brittleness. It’s not even worth looking for mushrooms growing in the soil, it’s just so dry. Fungi once again, or lack of, will show you that we are living through hotter and drier summers in southern England.

The North Downs, like its southerly sisters, the South Downs, are a chalky landscape. There are lots of beech trees in this type of soil. This means the very large Ganoderma bracket fungus is a pretty common sight on the many beech trees that are found here.

Thanks for reading.

More mushrooms

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North Downs diary: From Rochester to Detling, the need for safe passage

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

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North Downs Diary, Detling, Kent, July 2017

Standing outside the Cock Horse pub in Detling, a man smoking a cigarette approaches me. He points to the Pilgrims Way across the road:

‘When you do all this walking,’ he says, ‘where do you sleep?’ His step is a little unsteady, speech a little slow.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘We don’t have to sleep in the woods.’ These walks have been mostly in one day, bar the odd night in a B&B.

He’s interested that I’m trying to walk the North Downs over a longer period – ‘that’s commitment,’ he says, launching into tales of life in the village. He points again towards the Pilgrims Way and a Tudor gate on the corner.

‘That’s the oldest structure in Detling,’ he says.

Reading the plaque in front of it, the gate once led to a resting house for pilgrims making their way to Canterbury, perhaps as far back as 1200. But he has more to tell:

‘Two peacocks used to walk around the streets. They were so noisy I would throw out any food I could just to shut them up.’

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Now there are no peacocks in the street. Where did they go? He points again across the road, cigarette stub between his fingers.

‘One of them jumped off the wall and into the road. She was run over by someone who works in the pub – she’s not working tonight. It was just a little car but the bird was totally obliterated.’

What happened to the male bird, I ask.

‘He kept on walking around, making this terrible racket because he was on his own.’

We thank him for his stories and cross to re-join the Pilgrims Way.

This morning we began our walk at Rochester station. Stepping off the platform it was not only the river Medway that cut the downs. For nearly an hour our nostrils filtered the stench of muck. Nowhere was safe: Rochester Cathedral with its sprawling Catalpa tree, the river itself and adjacent Dickensian suburbs (Oliver Twist Way). Perhaps only the forlorn sight of a magpie searching for food on plastic grass in a front garden drew our attention away from that invasive agricultural funk.

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The escape from the smell only came upon gaining the heights of Nashenden Down, where Kent Wildlife Trust are returning arable monoculture to chalk grassland richness. The work had already made a difference as Peter, my Kentish companion for the day, had found a wall butterfly basking in amongst flowers protected by a shelterbelt of trees. Overhead swifts, house martins and swallows fed on an aerial sea of insects as they migrated south away from our troubled isles.

From Nashenden Down we looked across the Medway to the point where, ten months ago, we had stumbled out of the endless and overgrown chestnut coppices to be met by the bolt of high speed rail and the meandering Medway. At Nashenden Down the fields of wheat were bordered by red poppies with petals torn away by the same winds that earlier had brought the foul smell to Rochester. I pulled out my phone and streamed Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, revelling in the pastoral glory of Albion.

Beyond Nashenden Down, the North Downs Way then turned to the woody ridge with small breaks of chalk downland and random litter and fly-tipping. On knapweed stems Peter demonstrated an unerring ability to find brown argus butterflies, a member of the blue family. This is a skill he has perfected after months of working in Cambridgeshire meadows. At Bluebell Hill the wind whipped the sloe-heavy scrub and flattened the fields of marjoram. It was no land for the comb-over.

The route slips away beneath the A229 and then slaloms to one of several holloways haloed by overgrown hedges of hawthorn and field maple. A right-hand turn in the hedge arrives in a field marked by Kit’s Coty, the remnants of a Neolithic burial chamber, erected some 5000 years ago. The trail rises again after crossing the route of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link at Boxley into Westfield Wood, a steep ascent through brown yew woods. The creation of the tunnel resulted in the discovery of Britain’s earliest well-dated Neolithic longhouse, some 6000-years-old. That fact added a further layer of magic and mystery to the deep shade of the yew trees that followed it. That mystery evaporated in the gruelling ascent to the ridgetop of yews, breaking again into the lighter landscape of silver birch and field maple. At the track side stood an old oak with a hollow heart.

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To get to this side of Detling, where we met the local man with many stories to tell, we had to cross the A249 on a footbridge named ‘Jade’s Crossing’. It was constructed in memory of an eight-year-old girl and her grandmother who were hit by a car trying to cross the road in December 2000 when no such crossing existed.

‘I knew her family,’ the man outside the pub said. ‘Her grandmother died with her. Jade ran out into the road and her grandmother tried to grab her.’

To know that we could only safely cross the road because a girl and her grandmother died trying to do so, along with two other people before them, is terrible. They brought the A249 to Detling, cut the village in half, and it took 40 years for government to make it safe.

Back on the North Downs, the pub and its tales behind us, we step to the side of the Pilgrims Way as cars pass. We turn off into fields and head back up onto the chalk ridge of the North Downs Way. The light is fading, specks of rain touch our cheeks, clouds loom. In the scrub red and black berries offer warnings, chalk flowers form a mat at the path’s edge: the ever-present marjoram, enjoying a bountiful year, broken by spikes of agrimony, vervain and the fading leaves of yellow-wort. We stop to take in the folds of the downs, creases formed over millennia by water running down into the Medway valley.

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In the grey, rain-flecked sky, swallows and swifts feed in the last of the light. To them, it is autumn, they are returning south to Africa. We, too, are moving into the autumn and heading south, but only as far as Bearsted station. Whoever we are, wherever we’re going, we all seek safe passage.

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North Downs diary: An escape from the city

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Gasteruption assectator, a parasitic wasp

North Downs diary, Farthing Downs, June 2017

The last day of June but still flowers are yet to bloom. The meadow’s time has not been missed. On Farthing Downs the gate’s latch clicks and ringlet butterflies jig between grasses. Lady’s and hedge bedstraw cover patches in a lemon meringue mattress form, a reminder of the microcosms of grasslands:  dampness, the presence of certain rock or regular disturbance – it all leads to diversify the plants that appear now, and where others want to be. Skylarks still have songs to sing, as do yellowhammers, a song thrush down in the woody field edge. Crows half-heartedly mob a sparrowhawk with prey clasped between its talons.

On the lower slopes hundreds of meadow browns, ringlets and skippers cross the path sheltered by trees and the adjacent slope. It is that sense of abundance that so many lament losing. These chalk grasslands, managed with the long-view in mind, are the exception here on the edge of London. For centuries the North Downs have felt like an escape route from the city. Don’t forget that for thousands of years people have tramped the Pilgrims’ Way to the sacred site of Canterbury. To me they feel like a doorway to something better, somewhere free of the city’s ills. Somewhere you can breathe, where a wild, pastoral world still reigns. In truth it is just a thought and the reality remains different.

The only way is up!

It’s quiet but I meet people walking dogs. A woman admires spikes of rosebay willowherb, remarking in a strong Indian inflection: ‘beautiful wildflowers’, snapping them with her camera phone. Another lady with a hint of Yorkshire in her voice says how delighted she is to watch marbled white butterflies. Whilst examining hogweed flowers a woman from the north of the border asks what I’m looking for. There’s a parasitic wasp with full ovipositor raised over its back like a scorpion ready to sting – of course it does nothing of the sort.

‘I’m looking at the thing that made Darwin think there was no God!’ I say.

Her eyes widen, she looks away, and she knows exactly the thing I mean.

‘I remember reading about them,‘ she says.

Ichneumon wasps insert their needle-like ovipositor into their prey, laying an egg which pupates into a grub that eats the prey from within.

Sitting to scribble this on a desire line between pyramidal orchids, vetches, marjoram and clover, a scorpion fly rests momentarily and horseflies make their attacks. They perch on my bag with turquoise compound eyes and trowel-like mouth parts. I flail my arms like a chimpanzee, mindful that a dog walker may soon approach and offer emergency first aid. These downs hold great riches, some of which only want your blood.

North Downs diary

North Downs diary: The dawn chorus at Gatton Park

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Dawn at Gatton

North Downs diary, Gatton Park, Surrey, April 2017

As we drive into Gatton Park a mistle thrush and a robin are singing under streetlamps. In front of this vast estate, with gardens laid out by the famous ‘Capability’ Brown, the darkness yields little birdsong. It’s 4:30 and dawn is yet to break on the downs, even the nearby M25 is held in relative silence. A cold wind blows across the lawns before the estate mansion, once the dwelling of the Colmans Mustard family, now an environmental education centre run by the Gatton Trust. Jess Hughes, the Trust’s education officer, is leading a dawn walk of the grounds and I am here to pick out the birdsong. Walking in a place I don’t know without full vision is unnerving with 3 hours sleep, so we pause at the dark blur of trees and fish for birdsong.

Walking down from the hill the wind dips, we ruffle the feathers of roosting woodpigeons in passing underneath their trees. Those wings and that kerfuffle are unmistakeable. Blackbirds sing from ranks of mature trees, the repeated verses of a song thrush pitched across the cover. A robin scratches its scribbly tunes from a branch somewhere. The dawn chorus always alters the sense of time that you take with you before one of these walks. I have learnt to recognise the change in sound with the change in the light, the point when some species emerge or sing. There is a set list of sorts.

As the light begins to spill over we enter a wood of tall, stringy ash and scrubby bramble. Behind us, the open parkland begins to fill with the flurry of blackbird music, my personal highlight of the dawn chorus. The tide pushes down through the open lawns and dotted trees, across the Serpentine stream to meet us in this wood. The blackbirds appear in ones and twos, I never know if it’s a case of birds moving like an armada, or whether one by one they blink into life like bulbs.

We hear not only song, alarm calls pierce through – the ticking of wrens, the rattling of a mistle thrush. We continue on back to the brink of woodland. The Serpentine crawls between the wood and park, on its banks yellow cowslips offer the day’s first glimpses of colour. At the water’s edge sweet woodruff flowers, its use for flavouring gin draws warm appreciation. Mallards drift in the subtle flow, in the shade of a tree opposite the first blackcap bubbles and warbles. From further downstream a great tit adds its bicycle pump to the mix.

Now crows skate to and fro overhead, a kestrel edges trees and hovers over the long grass in search of a first meal. We head round to the vast lake along a track marked by wild garlic, the sun rising between alders, behind clouds, the light rippling in the water. We pass Gatton Park’s edges where old yews have been lopped and anglers have built platforms embellished with woodchip for their camps. A neighbouring field overgrown with nettles lies for sale, from the group there are worries of an impending threat to the downs, echoed across Surrey by recent proposals to build entire new villages. Whenever green space is for sale it can be the only thought.

We pass up away from the enormous lake near veteran oaks enclosed by fencing, remnants of ancient parkland. The sun rises in the south east, the fresh leaves of the oaks glowing lime green in the light. We pause at the crown of the hill, before a Pulhamite rockery brought back from the brink of woodland by the Trust’s volunteers. Edging the hill is an ash tree, protruding, exposed to the south before Surrey, the Weald and Sussex. It is yet to leaf but Jess and the group have found fruit. A tree creeper inches the pale bark, its curved bill picking away for food. It’s a pointer to the time of day: dawn is over, the hard work has just begun.

North Downs diary

North Downs diary: The bees are racing on the Mole

Daniel Greenwood4 Comments

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North Downs diary, Mole Valley, Surrey, April 2017

I follow the Mole gap trail into Norbury Park, ash woodland glowing in the spring sunshine, dog’s mercury abounding on the soil between the pale trunks. The railway line cuts across the eastern edge of the woods, a brick bridge taking trains straight over one of the major footpaths. Under the bridge a lady walks her dog down the hill, her shape appearing beneath the brick. She pauses as I pass under the bridge and takes a photo.

‘All I could see was your legs,’ she says. ‘And then the rest of you appeared.’

We both have cameras and she asks what I’m here to photograph, about butterflies and how many I’ve seen today. Orange tip, brimstone, peacock and my first small tortoiseshell of the year. Along the banks of the Mole butterflies have flitted in good number.

‘Oh I haven’t seen many,’ she says. She tells me more about Norbury Park, its managers Surrey Wildlife Trust and how angry she feels about the fact all the Trust’s rangers will be made redundant. ‘It’s always the people who are out there doing the actual work that suffer. When there’s a fire or something goes wrong there won’t be anyone there for us to contact.’

The ranger programme was being funded with money from Surrey County Council, and Jenny has been making efforts to register her discontent with local councillors. ‘It’s all about priorities, they’ve just resurfaced the A24 and when there was nothing wrong with it.’

‘I devote myself to the countryside,’ she says. ‘Apart from 3 years in London for university I have always lived in Surrey. I spend hours walking with the dog and never get round to everything I need to do in life. When I get home I just head back out again.’

I ask her how things have changed over the years.

‘There are definitely less birds than there used to be,’ she says.

As we stand talking next to the railway bridge the sun shines down through the leafless trees. Peacocks sun themselves on the ride’s edge, bright yellow brimstones pass across the slopes above us. We say farewell, Jenny heading off into the Park while I continue south towards Box Hill.

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The Mole edges Norbury Park, where beech woods sprawl along the eastern slopes. On the other side of the river the smell and calling of livestock breaks through. In the woods the beeches gleam in the glory of the sun, ramsons begin to flower one by one. Leaving the Park, farmland opens out and the woodland is replaced by fields with single oaks, and a beanpole lime tree riddled with mistletoe. I learned recently that mistletoe grows only on smooth bark, its seed is sticky and is often left there by the mistle thrush, so named for this reason. The branches in the canopy of limes are always sleek and silver, perfect for the mistletoe to attach itself to. The oaks are grand specimens, one dying back from above. Many trees are leafing on the Downs but no oak or ash quite yet. Overhead buzzards soar and mew, and the rickety frame of a red kite tumbles towards Box Hill.

The green fields turn instead to brown where cattle graze. More oaks mark the old field boundaries, likely once connected by hedgerows now removed. The farmer has fenced them to protect their roots and bark from the jaws and hoofs of his or her livestock. The fields are protected by electric fencing audibly ticking, but several of these oaks are dying, possibly from the damage done by the cattle. Crossing the Mole again the train line returns, a neat arch allows the river to flower as it kinks round. The light shimmers and ripples on the underside of the brickwork built almost in a spiral. It’s dizzying to watch for too long. Across the old footbridge and into a field named Foxbury Shaw more veteran oaks stand ready to leaf again, a trio leaning into a dried up channel, perhaps a former braid in the river.

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One oak has fallen and lies supine with that typical stag head of old roots. Passing close by I notice the swarming of insects at the root plate. It is surely too early for wasps and they appear too big. Edging closer, they are in fact hairy-footed flower bees whirring and zipping around the old roots. When the tree fell the roots lifted soil with them, now hardened like great chunks of biscuity dough. The sun has baked the soil and the wood of the fallen oak. Here is the very image of a life after death.

The oak is being mined by solitary bees, some, like the bronze furrow bee are minute. There are more animals besides them, with jumping spiders waiting for the chance to pinch their prey. One sits atop a root basking in the sun, camouflaged against the  bleached timber. The soil has been drilled with holes, the habitat of the flower bees. A group of about five to eight males, blonde and super-fast in flight, zip around me as I photograph their homes. Truly it is the sound of racing cars or X-wings tearing around at several hundred miles an hour. Another species of bee basks on the upturned roots, it has long, black antennae and is disturbed when I look more closely. It’s a mourning bee, a parasite that lays its eggs in the nests of hairy footed flower bees. The eggs hatch, eat the young of the flower bee and then eat the food stash left for its prey. Despite our clichés, some bees are only in it for themselves.

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North Downs diary: In Banstead Woods the consensus is growing

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North Downs diary, Banstead Woods, March 2017

A bench has been built in a patch of recently churned clay, a rusty red. The bench matches the colour, dedicated to Jamie Eve who passed away in 2016 aged 26. His dedication tells passersby that he loved this place. A bouquet of tulips and ivy lies on the seat. Around Jamie’s bench bluebells peek, it is that special time. All across this wood the lilies push through. All around us life is returning, our side of this earth is coming closer to the sun, and wildlife is responding.

Edward Thomas, a poet made famous, really, by the success of Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways and sense of invigoration given to the subject of nature writing, wrote about the Banstead Downs. It is only because of reading Macfarlane’s books that I know of Thomas and for that reason that this time of year, when bluebell leaves threaten to reveal flowers, when the earliest pipings of blackbirds don’t quite progress to nightly songposts, reminds me of his poems. I have never truly got on well with his style, but Macfarlane’s success is the ability to bring you closer to the lesser known authors, walkers and naturalists. The line ‘Spring is being dreamed’ is one that is quoted across media formats at this time of year. It perfectly encapsulates that rough and wearied time when winter has bitten in and bitten long, but spring’s presence is unmistakable.

You can feel it in the movements and actions of birds, the great tit, chaffinch, blue tit, tree creeper all singing and moving across the wood. The consensus is growing. The hornbeam’s branches look different to the way they were two weeks ago, as the buds begin to break with their usual slowness. Small clusters of leaves spit from elder branches, hawthorns are never too ready to shift with the season. Throughout Banstead Woods large oaks stand in stoic silence. There is no hint of a leaf, their fistfuls of buds, many of which will never be needed, remain golden brown and closed. I remember last year seeing the tiny red leaves of oak coming out months in advance on the 25th January in south London, but this year there has not been the mildness to tempt the oaks out.

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These oaks, along with beeches, hornbeam pollards and mighty sweet chestnuts, suggest this wood was once more open, lighter and more intensively managed. These trees bestow a grandeur not quite felt in other woods I know along the North Downs, even the mighty beeches of Devilsden Wood. Here the trees are all on the plateau of Banstead Downs, their scale is not reduced by the steep slopes of the many valleys that cut through this chalky landscape. Here storm Doris has broken limbs and split trees, several by gusts blown along a ride that cuts widely through. Sometimes you have to squirm through branches to carry on.

I pass a man with binoculars and ask him of hawfinch and lesser spotted woodpecker, two birds that are rumoured to be present here. He has black curls with a touch of grey and says he has never seen them but ‘surely they must pass through’. He exhibits a sense of contentment in what the land holds for him this afternoon. It marks the end of Banstead Woods, signalled by a family passing, booted and offering a greeting as they make their way inside. At the wood’s edge the landscape opens out, a few of the typical farmland oaks stand in the centre of the field and along a hedgerow boundary. I follow the path along the wood’s edge where crumbling oaks and beeches dominate, with laurels and rhododendrons creeping in at their toes.

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At nearby Canons Farm a buzzard perches in branches, mobbed by crows, stirring starlings, sparrows and finches to leave their feeding until later. Above a lane enclosed by a close crop holly hedge birds explode across the grey sky, the buzzard following them in a blaze of alarm calls. Following the road round past a small clutter of houses where a man revs his van and reverses out, its emissions pungent, the buzzard perches in the branches of an oak. In the distance jackdaws roost and break in the tops of trees, closer at hand a crow swings low and short of the buzzard. It is unworried by the attention, taking its time, waiting for the right moment to move off over the fields again.

Tracing a path through leafing croplands that lead into the wealthy suburbia of Kingswood, the prospect of spring has been sidelined. It rings true – those who have no closeness to or desire to venture into woods or landscapes of the less manicured kind, can have little sense of the changing seasons. Treading the verge on route to the train station beside mansions with static laurel hedges, four cars and paved driveways, I can guess what Edward Thomas valued more.

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North Downs diary: Snow’s short stint

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Snowy Downs
Winter birch

North Downs diary, Farthing Downs, January 2017

I pass through the gate onto the downs and a fox crosses the lane, that long, fluffed up tail and jinking stride. It seeks the safety of the woodland edge. Snow lingers on the downs, magpies feed in small groups. When they fly up it’s not unlike slices of snow lifting off the ground. Their strategy is simple: feed until a bigger beast passes, sit in the trees, then return. The sun breaks the dough-like cloud, a kestrel cutting through with ease. She finds the tip of a branch and balances, the twig bending under her weight. She looks out across the snow. Feeling herself perhaps too exposed, she shifts to the fox’s wooded margin. Restless, knowing she is now unwelcome in open land, she cuts west and disappears over the hill.

The hazel scrub carries beads of melted ice, hanging long out of the breeze. The shapes show black branches like little snow globes, a looking glass into some dark wood of elsewhere. On the ground the snow carries tokens of those living things that have since passed: dog, human, crow. In between them the stems of wild carrot persist. On the steepest slopes of the downs, sleds slip across the scene, their crew dressed in pink and orange, the colours of our mass production garment industries. On the eastern slopes of Happy Valley the snow rests without the patchiness of the highest point. Yet more magpies are driven from piercing their bills in search of soil. At the bottom of the hill birch trees reflect the snow’s whiteness, their reddish hue shows they are not whiter-than-white.

I heard a radio programme recently charting the decline of snowfall in Kent over the past fifty-years. It brought the presenter to the point: might snow become a thing of the past in southern England? Climate change’s predicted course means that the snowy downs here as I see them today may yet be something that can only be spoken of in the past tense. So does the act of photography now morph into a sentimental act of conservation? Our species’ recent photographic binge, due to the camera phone revolution, means that snow will never be forgotten in image, but its sensuality can’t be felt in a jpeg or print.

I forget these things so quickly when London’s short snowy affair departs, the glow of light from the white ground, the dripping trees, the soft press and crunch of boots, the sheer joy that children feel and express on their plastic sleds. Perhaps to us southerners who see so many different types of weather, the loss of snow’s short stint will barely be noticed. For climate change will bring profound challenges for species that depend on certain conditions, be they polar bears, butterflies, mushrooms or migrating songbirds. On the downs, like many thousands of others I’m sure, I seek change in itself. A different state of mind, of perspective, colours, textures and places to walk in. Nature reminds us always that change will come.

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North Downs diary: Cows, fields and sunshine

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Sunset oak - North Downs diary - November 2016 - D. Greenwood

North Downs diary, Farthing Downs, November 2016

Three o’clock and the sun sinks in the east, casting long rays of light through the papery sepals and stems of knapweed and agrimony, summer’s relics. Threads of spider silk drift between these old frameworks, a material stronger than steel by comparison. The experts will tell you that at this time of year birds depart the highest open reaches of the downs, and there are few birds around. This is the perfect camouflage for a crow, the sun so low and dazzling there could be hundreds of them chowing down on the edge of the hill. One lifts up, gliding on the wind, hovering kestrel-like, remembering its place.

I came here with thoughts of waxcaps bright and beautiful, but two hours out here and I only find one picked and overturned. The life is being scraped from the downs by the raking wind, the tumbling temperature and coming dark, the slide into winter. Yet every seasonal change is the same, like a shift in human history, it is not one event that brings about the enclosure of darkness but several over time. You can find its waymarkers, indicators of something different on the horizon. Each season, like each era of civilisation, is a product of the ones which came before.

Cows grazing - North Downs diary - November 2016 - D. Greenwood

The cows graze the grasslands, their coats lit red by the sun setting behind them. Their breaths puff out like smoke as they chomp. It is a reassuring sound, grass uprooted and chewed over. They offer few glances to those of us passing by this morning. Pied wagtails, a bird I don’t often see here, perch on their backs and pick at their pats. In the scrub slowly being cleared from the downs by the City of London, redwing break between hawthorn and rose, their wings lit as they break cover. I know why this work is being undertaken, I’ve helped with it elsewhere on the North Downs, but I am losing my old signposts in this open landscape. The area where willow warblers once nested, where redwing and whitethroats used to feed up, a hawthorn where chafers fed one evening: all of it grubbed out, the soil lightly ploughed. This scrub is being cleared to allow the return of chalk grassland, one of Europe’s rarest habitats, much of which is found in England and a surprising amount in London. Our response to the clearance of trees is almost always emotional, that’s okay, but it’s important to know why it’s happening but equally important to ask why.

A woman passes me with a broad smile, covering her eyes from the sun to look at me. She stops:

‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ she says, her companion a little surprised that she has stopped mid-conversation. ‘Cows, fields and sunshine.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s like being in the countryside. Wait a minute, I think it is the countryside.’

‘I’m lucky, I live just next to it,’ she says, making her way.

I agree with her, she is lucky.

Up ahead a figure sits on a mobility scooter next to the millenium monument atop the hill. They are taking pictures of the sun disappearing behind the hill. Knowing I’m part of the photos I stop and ask, ‘would you like me to give a certain pose?’ She laughs and throws out her arms to suggest a stance.

‘What camera have you got there?’ she asks, my camera on its tripod resting over my shoulder like a bazooka. ‘I’ve got a Canon but haven’t used it in a while,’ she adds.

I don’t enter into the Nikon-Canon banter.

Her name is Tilly and she lives locally in Coulsdon. ‘Just down the road,’ she says. ‘Where are you from?’

I tell her that I’m not so local and I come here to get away from the SE postcode.

She asks what I’m here to photograph, ‘wildlife?’ She has it right, but there are a disappointing lack of mushrooms. ‘It’s probably the wrong time of year for that,’ she says.

Dusk on the downs - North Downs diary - November 2016 - D. Greenwood

It’s been the right time before but an anxious thought creeps in – does someone know the movement of waxcaps here in some kind of hyper-intuitive detail? Probably not, it’s just been a rubbish autumn for them. She recounts tales of campervan holidays out in the New Forest’s old military sites where she could bolt her caravan into the old RAF concrete and fly agarics fruited on her portable doorstep. ‘I’ve not been there for a while though,’ she says. ‘I was ill last year, and I’ve been ill this year, too.’ She nods as if admitting something.

The sun has left us now, a few scraps of cloud coloured by the glow.

‘I love the red of those clouds,’ she says. ‘Apparently there’s a green flash when the sun goes down.’

‘It’s called the green ray, there’s a French film about it called Le Rayon Vert,’ I say.

‘Oh, I’ll have to look it up,’ she says. ‘Watch out for the cow pats.’

 

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North Downs diary: The owl is calling autumn

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Autumn horse chestnut

North Downs diary, Coulsdon, September 2016

It’s dry and dull on the downs, wild carrot and ragwort desiccating, but house martins migrate overhead as they begin their return to Africa. In the damp and shady nooks of Devilsden Wood’s rotting logs the mushrooms sprout. The first I can find is a tiny bonnet rising out of beech leaves, one such leaf topped by an aphid. There is a spread of what I think are webcaps, orange-yellow in the wood dark. Now I remember the ache of kneeling for so long, gently turning the focus ring of the lens to catch the right part of the mushroom: the serrated gills, the skin of the cap. Overhead the soft calling of a tawny owl comes, at four o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve noticed this for the past month, with owls calling at two and three o’clock. The jays begin to rouse with their piercing shrieks, they are the principle mob leaders against the tawny. But no ruckus is forthcoming. I’ve read that tawny owls actually call more commonly in daylight rather than under darkness. Reading about them only this morning I learned that owls are better at hunting at dusk and some species are aided by an increase in moonlight. The jays are right to be worried, with birds taking up the largest chunk of a tawny’s diet. Under a decaying beech trunk dressed in moss the shape of a wood mouse trails into the cover of the leftover bark, another species fearful of the owl.

Away from the fungi I take a closer look at an old horse chestnut perhaps some 200-300 years in age, planted as a boundary marker on the edge of Happy Valley. It stands out beyond the still verdant hazel coppices with its floor of red crinkled leaves. It’s often the first to leaf and the first to leave. Out beyond the trees in Happy Valley the sun casts long shadows, the lines of hay the shadows of recent cutting, soon to be bailed, probably sold on to feed local grazing animals through the winter. I don’t quite know. Elsewhere on the North Downs these rows of hay are burnt, its value no longer universally high across the chalk. The sun sets over Devilsden Wood, the sheep grazing in the golden September light. All appears well in this remnant of downland past.

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North Downs diary: The man from Italy

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Marco
Bee and scabious valley

Coulsdon, June 2016

Britain has descended into political turmoil, but out here on the downs normality persists. Summer’s flagship species are on the wing in the form of the marbled whites, meadow browns resting low down in the grass, feeding on hawkbits, hawkbeards or whatever these large yellow daisies happen to be. Yellow rattle flowers in its prime, this nationally rare flower in full voice on Farthing Downs. Now is the time to seek orchids, but so very many of them can be found in the right place it’s more a case of avoiding them. Pyramidal orchid, common spotted orchid and common twayblade gather in great number on one slope. Crab spiders cling conspicuous to florets, waiting for their moment.

The birdsong has not yet come to its end: a whitethroat sits atop scrub not yet cleared, singing, preening and dropping down to safety, a skylark and a yellowhammer distant. The plaintive piping of a raptor can be heard and a kestrel with feathers lost skates across, disappearing beyond the brow of the hill. Crows raise an alarm, I scan the now open downs for a bird of prey. Crows, ragged and worried, fly across the roof of woods, and more alarm calls are made. A scuffle ensues, the brown of a buzzard’s wings, like melting milk chocolate in this light, is followed into the trees by crows. It’s usually where the battle ends.

Trundling on in the growing heat, I pass through an area of oak, ash and bramble. From the long wash of pale grasses high as hips, a young deer bursts free. It jigs and jumps up, not so much running as bouncing along the sheltered belt of trees and bushes. It seems almost naked, in body and spirit, free of all sense. It ranges to obscurity. Soon a man dressed in a trench coat passes with his dog and their dwindling shapes swim in the overpowering scene of breaking sun and flowering grasses.

Moving through the quiet of Devilsden Wood, the clamour of school children’s voices behind me, I quietly question the decision of motor cross riders to drive back and forth for half an hour along Ditches Lane. There is a sense of a hollowing out, the opportunity to express oneself without remorse now, at least since Friday morning. I walk through these woods, ancient, growing, and think of all they have lived through. The world wars, Napoleonic war, the Magna Carter, what about the Norman Conquest, the Roman invasion, even the Neolithic revolution of 6000 years ago? I don’t know.

I leave the woods and its splintering blackbird phrases. Why do they still sing now, is there still time to breed? The meadows have thickened with grasses in one week, I rue their itchy monotony. We have experienced rainfall on an unprecedented scale, 40mm of rain in what Londoners call ‘the Brexit storms’. There are so few butterflies, only really the meadow brown, a creature that seems to endure rain, moves amongst the flowers. I feel ripped off, dispossessed. I dream of these meadows in winter. Now they have been reduced. Heading back I see a figure on the hill with a guitar. In five years I’ve never seen someone like this here, a place mainly of dog walkers, horse riders, retirees exploring the London Loop and the weekend charge of cyclists. I approach him.

He has dark hair in a ponytail, I don’t think he’s English. ‘Hi, can I take your picture?’ I ask. ‘I’ve never seen someone with a guitar here.’

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Usually I play the piano but I want to busk in London so I am learning to play the guitar. I am Italian, from the north.’

He begins playing a song but can’t remember who it’s by, someone American, slapping his wrist against the hollow body of the guitar. When he finishes I ask him what he thinks about the referendum.

‘I have been here one week and in Italy they did not even talk about it. Now I am here and wow,’ he says. ‘My friends think that I am in London surrounded by cars and buildings, but I am here.’ He opens his arms to the sunny downs. ‘And I love it.’

I thank him, Marco is his name, and point him towards Happy Valley. You can go that way and walk for weeks, I tell him. It’s something I always dream of doing, ambition reduced by its likely pain and lack of time to do it. I leave him to practice, flecks of struck guitar strings ringing out from the crown of summer downland.

North Downs diary