Walking from East Ilsley to Stanmore. Blue sky and a biting cold wind. Chalk clay is milky and the soil composed as much of stone as of earth. The fields, with autumn-sown crops looking fragile and sparse, are speckled with turned over bedrock. From the gnarly skeletons of winter trees, the flint-sharp grating of fieldfares’ alarm calls as they spill into the sky.
Turning left onto an ancient pathway, we are enclosed by scrub and trees on either side. Blackbirds cluck and swoop low into the thick vegetation. Clematis, Old Man’s Beard, blankets the hedgerows. When the sun glances through, the seed-heads appear like frost.
Emerging again into open fields a copse now almost stripped of its leaves. The brown of the bare trees is richly varied, with tints of gold, orange, purple, green.
Mudwriter 