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!’. That eternal harbinger of spring, nearby but hard to pinpoint, elusive, the softness and warmth of its call hard to reconcile with the brutality of its existence. Where is the unlucky nest, I wonder.
Four birds fly across the escarpment towards the woods. At first glance they are wood pigeons, but as they pass overhead, I note that two birds are different. The pointed wings, striped body and tail alternating between swept back and fan-shaped, they almost look like sparrowhawks. But they’re not; it’s a pair of cuckoos. A very rare sight.
I climb back up through the trees and run the full length of the hill, tracing the edge, absorbing the views across the Severn Vale to the Malvern Hills and Forest of Dean. Somewhere beyond, through the fading gap, are the Black Mountains, their bulk hidden by cloud.
I run home down the old tramway, along which quarried rock was once transported. Ruts in the limestone, the ghosts of old wagons.
Bird song is everywhere
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!’. That eternal harbinger of spring, nearby but hard to pinpoint, elusive, the softness and warmth of its call hard to reconcile with the brutality of its existence. Where is the unlucky nest, I wonder.
Four birds fly across the escarpment towards the woods. At first glance they are wood pigeons, but as they pass overhead, I note that two birds are different. The pointed wings, striped body and tail alternating between swept back and fan-shaped, they almost look like sparrowhawks. But they’re not; it’s a pair of cuckoos. A very rare sight.
I climb back up through the trees and run the full length of the hill, tracing the edge, absorbing the views across the Severn Vale to the Malvern Hills and Forest of Dean. Somewhere beyond, through the fading gap, are the Black Mountains, their bulk hidden by cloud.
I run home down the old tramway, along which quarried rock was once transported. Ruts in the limestone, the ghosts of old wagons.
Bird song is everywhere
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