I
was, as they say, walking it off. London life is a bombardment of
stimuli which — after they exhaust you — keep on coming until you are
eroded to the bones of anxiety and inferiority. The only cure I've found
is walking. Lewes to Brighton looked long enough.
***
The
first thing I do on leaving Lewes station is get lost. The south coast
messes with my internal bearings. North becomes south. East is no longer
where it should be and I tell Anna
her compass is lying and plough off in the wrong direction. Twice. We
find the correct lane to Brighton, miss the correct turning off and pass
through a mazy series of farm tracks through the levels of the river
Ouse instead. The soil is dark and damp, the path strewn with yellow
snails with a variety of dark swirls on the shell. We gingerly picked
our way through as a mark of respect to the creatures that belong here,
who aren't lost and passing through on a moment of map reading
incompetence. We emerged through a tunnel of trees into the next village
along from where we should be. No problem -- we'll just take the path
through the fields of mud and
take the next track into the downs. This is a way marked path, well
trodden and over a beautifully worn old stile, yet it runs through the
middle of a sown field. We both think it feels a little wrong to walk
these paths.
Rain
on chalk hisses like an insect stridulating on a summer's evening. It
catches me out, has me staring at the long grass confused until it makes
sense. There are no insects here today: not the spectacular Adonis Blue
butterfly nor humdrum flies too small and fleeting to identify. There
is just the persistency of rain sweeping in over the downs, as it had
the whole morning and would for the rest of the day. Skylarks hover
above the crops, defying gravity in a fat brown flutter of wings, whilst
singing the most quintessentially English of bird songs; in the most
English of summer weather.
What I found on the downs was a Corn Bunting.
Beside a ploughed up and planted down — wheat and rapeseed where it
should be wildflower rich grassland — one sung from the top of a manure
pile. The sound and smell of the old countryside. Through the rain I
find it with my binoculars. Unashamedly fat, brown and streaky, the Corn
Bunting is the most unspectacular of special birds. A bird that fitted
so well into the old systems of agriculture that it took its name from
them. A bird of messy inefficiency, it was swatted aside by
intensification, the destruction of hedgerows and the ploughing of
margins that now... The 90% declines since 1970 tell a grim story; that I
can't remember the last one I saw before this tells another. It seems
doomed to become a feathered folk memory: the barley bird, so local that
populations 30km apart could sing with different dialects. Too local to
survive the 21st century.
What
I also found on the downs was space. A horizon not hemmed in by
buildings and a landscape where the name makes sense. It lacks the
magnificent up of mountains: instead on the summit the horizon appears
flat, the space inbetween drifting down like the hollow between waves. I
find a landscape both of comforting old Englishness but also bleakness
in this weather. As well as birds I watch the rain rolling over and
falling on crumbling farmsteads and rusting machinery.
The
walk took us over the final crest and dropped us back on to roads until
we hit the chalk cliffs of the English Channel. A shingle beach and the
milky grey of the English seaside. From here it was a long slog to
Brighton, past millionaire yachts and Asda; marina apartments and
concrete flyovers; promenades and graffiti covered fences. And flowers
growing from every crevice.
The next day I feel fantastic.
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