A rare sight
The path winds up like a ribbon around the contours of the slope, hard-baked and dusty after weeks without rain. In the quiet of the grass, away from passing feet and shade of the stunted trees, once rare cowslips spread out amongst buttercups. Bright yellow beacons, ankle height, nodding in the strengthening breeze. The path skirts past low crags of shattered, fossil-packed limestone, evidence that this now high place, 900 feet up and out of sight of the coast, was once the turbulent, busy bed of a warm shallow sea. But that was 150 million years ago. Today, mercifully, the heat of recent days has dissipated, replaced by cold steel skies and purple-tinged clouds fizzing in from the east. A better day to run and to be alone. Almost as soon as I arrive at the top of the hill, I am descending, initially down a rock-strewn gully and then spurring off across the hillside on an increasingly faint path that cuts down across slope, legs whipped by gorse. That’s when I hear it: ’Cuckoo!’. Th