It was a wren that led me to the Temple of the Winds.
As usual, I had heard him before I had seen him, the loud, unmistakeable peeps belying his speckled smallness. He flitted and hopped through the trees, leading me like some benign spirit, his tiny lungs erupting with song. And with a flicker of his wings, he darted.
The sounds of his fellow birds took his place. Robins, blackbirds, coal tits. A woodpecker hammering into a tree somewhere, the rapid tap, tap, tap shuddering through the cold air. And then the Temple was there in front of me, exposed to the elements.
It is not some Parthenon-like edifice on the hill. It is more a space to stop, named after a Bronze Age monument that once stood here, where a curved stone bench now commemorates the donation of the land to the National Trust. I studied the view in the silence, a patchwork of England laid out before me. And it was a most English scene, where man and nature had compromised with their familiar jigsaw of field and woodland, of hedges and walls and vineyards. Lone oaks stood in sheep-grazed pastures. Roofs and church towers peered above the firs, the airport an incongruous smudge on the sage horizon.
I could have stayed there until dark with nothing but my thoughts and the wind. Below me, all kinds of trees stood tangled on the steep slopes. Sycamore, beech, hazel, rowan. Oak and holly, bracken and bramble. The odd yew, fat and gnarled. It was as though all the trees in the world wanted a view of what I was seeing from up there, of the South Downs rippling towards the sea.
Look closely and you can see nature clamouring. You can see the busyness in the stillness. If we could go beneath the ground, we would see it: a crowded, complicated network of roots and fungi and micro-organisms, each one playing their part in the busy silence of nature.
People have often said to me that they could not live in the countryside. That it is too quiet, too eerie. Perhaps it is; I have lain in bed in hotels or campsites in the middle of nowhere and heard nothing but my own heartbeat, almost waiting for the subdued coo of an owl or some storybook monster. The mind wanders.
In towns and cities, at least, there are noises and lights to distract the mind. The scars of buildings can tell you about the dramas that unfolded there, should you wish to know. Generations hand over mantles and share stories to a soundtrack of engines and voices. There can be little time to think for yourself. Go from here to a rural hilltop and the whistling of the wind can suddenly unnerve.
But there is drama here, too. There is noise, suspense. There is emotion. There is love, death, destruction, restoration. Hope, despair. You will not find any of the human qualities, like forgiveness or humility. Think of the mother wren tirelessly building her nest and scouring the ground for food every day, in the hope that just one of her chicks survives. Or the roars of testosterone-pumped stags as they lock antlers in the heather. The fangs of a fox as they enter the neck of a rabbit. The withering of blackberries. The arrival of snowdrops in spring, toadstools in autumn. Cold-blooded lizards basking in the sun. The gradual absence of butterflies as their brief spell on earth comes to an end. The white, silencing grip of frost. And the drawn-out death of a tree each year, as leaves go from green to gold to brown, curling like paper, before being let go, forever.
This is as it should be. Nature is the mistress and timekeeper of it all. Were it not for the fact that it means I am getting older, I find a strange kind of comfort in the passing of the year – particularly now – as one season graciously hands over to the next. A quiet sign of change, turbulence. And I wonder if it is this that troubles people in some way about the countryside; that nature is not the calm Constable painting we expect it to be, that it is a volatile place beneath a veneer of silence. And in the silence, it demands more thought than we are prepared to allow.
Beneath a pine tree, I came to a bench, one of several dotted on the slopes of this hill. A small plaque read “Eric & Margaret got engaged here in Dec 2011”. And who can blame them? Silent, washed-out hills rolled away into the distance over three counties. Perhaps their engagement took place on that very day twelve years ago, a day just as bright and fresh with winter.
The plaque also stated that Margaret died two years later.
I took a deep breath, my throat filling with the scents of autumn. Of distant bonfire smoke, of pinecones and chestnuts. I took a seat on Margaret’s bench. Perhaps she was there, too, doing the same. There is love and death out here. If it wasn’t the wind that pricked my eyes with tears then it must have been the stillness.
Beautiful. 😊