by Hugh Thomson
I think of his words as I head up to Salisbury Plain. There are corn buntings sitting on the fence posts, friendly and bold birds in the presence of humans, given that their numbers have likewise been much reduced in the last few decades. The ‘Downland Reversion Scheme’ has subsidised local farmers to restore wildflower meadows, which has helped slow their decline.
It’s a far rarer bird I’m hoping to see, one that was driven to extinction in Britain by 1832 and is only now being slowly reintroduced. The male great bustard weighs in at some forty pounds, making it one of the heaviest birds in the world that can fly. The female is half the size but still hardly petite. They have strong legs and can run at great speed; they take off like Harrier jump jets, using those legs to spring high in the air before flying. Bustards can then cover distances of over 100 miles in the air.
Not surprisingly, such eminently trophyable birds attracted the attention of hunters. Henry VIII and other monarchs led hunts across the plain in search of them; you can see why Henry VIII in particular might have been so drawn to the bird, almost an avian simulacrum of himself. The local population enjoyed the attention. There is still a small hamlet called Bustard in the vicinity.
What drove the great bustard to extinction was not the hunting – although it can’t have helped – but changes in farming. The female generally laid two eggs in a year, on open ground like agricultural fields. Quite apart from other predators who were attracted to the large, juicy eggs, the chances of getting hit by a ploughshare increased as farming techniques improved.
So to try to reintroduce them to the British countryside is a quixotic if wonderful venture. They are not like red kites or beavers, tough scavenger species that may well spread past their current limited reintroduction areas. The bustard is a lumbering dowager duchess of a bird, as out of place on the wilds of Salisbury Plain as a Russian aristocrat – and it is from Russia that these birds are being reintroduced, in small numbers, by a team led by David Waters.
When I arranged to see the birds, I had spoken to David on the phone and asked why they bothered to bring them all the way from Russia when there was a larger and more convenient population in Spain. ‘We tested the DNA of stuffed British birds. The results were much closer to the Russian than the Spanish profile,’ he told me. And so each year they visit a large oblast south-east of Moscow to get some birds’ eggs.
David used to be a policeman before he set up the Great Bustard Group in 1998. He had become fascinated by the birds as a teenager. ‘I remember thinking that all the interesting birds lived in places like Papua New Guinea. Then I saw male bustards doing their display rituals and realised that wherever you go in the world, you won’t see a better sight.’
I have arranged to join a group of interested birdwatchers who are being taken by Lynne, David’s colleague, to see the release area for the birds; but not, as Lynne says, necessarily to see any of the bustards themselves, as they can be remarkably elusive for such a large bird; when crouched on the ground they camouflage well. Moreover, if the army are firing on the ranges, as they generally are, the bustards have plenty of reason to ‘duck and cover’. One of the more quixotic aspects of the bustard scheme is that they are being released into the jaws of the largest MOD firing area in the country.
This is a question that Andy raises. Andy has crew-cut hair and wears square, metallic glasses. He is also very angry. He introduces himself to the rest of the group as a committed Christian birdwatcher and conservationist, which raises a few interesting questions in my mind: how are Christian conservationists different from any other type? Do they believe in an avian afterlife? Or, quite interestingly, that there is an afterlife for extinct species? I start to wonder in all seriousness about the theology of this – which just shows what happens when you have been walking by yourself too long and sleeping on the tombs of dead kings. Luckily, before I can ask Andy, he fires off a stream of his own questions at Lynne.
How does the Trust stop bustards flying into power lines? (Answer: if there are enough ‘incidents’ – i.e. deaths – the electricity company will put up safety decoys.)
How are farmers persuaded to leave female bustards in peace when hatching, given they need so much undisturbed breeding space? (Answer: a cash reward if they inform the Trust and leave an area round the bustard unploughed – although they do have to spot the bustard before their combine harvesters reach the egg.)
The affable Lynne deals with these and other questions with an easy manner. She is a cheerful-looking blonde soul who would not be out of place in a Beryl Cook painting. But Andy is clearly a driven man. Others in the group shift a bit uneasily at his continued inquisition.
In my occasional encounters with twitchers, I’ve come across this before. The idea that the calm observation of birds flying freely in the air might in itself bring serenity and happiness is far from true. Britain’s most famous birdwatcher, Bill Oddie, has revealed that he is riven with neurosis and insecurity. Those obsessed with building their species lists drive up and down the country to outdo each other; they are monitored by a fact-checking jobsworth who has taken it upon himself to verify the sightings made by competing birdwatchers. There must be more joy in train-spotting. Which is why I have always remained a strictly amateur bird fancier.
Andy leans forward, the metallic frames of his glasses reminding me of the ones Laurence Olivier wore as a dentist when he tortured Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. He fingers the long telescopic barrel of his scope as he goes for the killer punch.
‘And how can you possibly justify single-species conservation?’ He says ‘single-species’ with a sibilant hiss. Lynne flinches as if an adder has appeared in the grass. Single-species conservation is the bête noire of the eco-warriors. It implies a distressingly narrow focus on just one animal – often a glamorous one like, it must be said, the great bustard – to the exclusion of the wider ecosphere and smaller species (‘Has anyone thought about the plankton?’ goes the plaintive cry). Single-species conservationists are seen as the stalkers of the eco-world, driven, compulsive and ever so slightly sad.
Lynne blushes, like a nice girl who’s been asked if she has an unsuitable boyfriend. ‘I thought you might ask me that. But we do have stone curlews as well. They enjoy the same habitat. They’re part of our programme.’
Andy goes quiet. We all get in the Land Rover that Lynne has brought to take us to the release area. The atmosphere remains tense and oppressive, perhaps from the combined warmth of the fleeces all the birdwatchers are wearing (even in summer they rarely moult).
I feel pleased that I have arranged for my friend Peter Buxton to join us for moral support and, more practically, to bring some extra binoculars so that I’m not going naked to the party. Peter has worked as a counsellor and is adept at pouring oil on troubled waters. He is also, unlike me, a serious birdwatcher.
‘So Andy,’ he asks, ‘have you seen the jibaro bustards in Spain?’
Andy lightens a little. ‘Ah yes, wonderful birds, the jib-aros.’ He ever so slightly rasps and stresses the Spanish ‘j’ in jibaro a little more than Peter had, to show his full possession of the species. I manage to stop myself from giggling, but only just. Andy’s face has darkened anyway as he stares out of the Land Rover window at the clouds of smoke that are rising from the MOD firing ranges. ‘But the jib-aros hate disturbance.’ Pause. ‘Like the great bustards,’ he adds ominously. Lynne hunkers down over the steering wheel and does not answer.
Peter tries Andy again: ‘Do you ever see a Dartford warbler in your part of the world? I came across one near here on Pewsey Hill.’
At this Andy almost purrs, like a difficult cat who has finally been tickled in the right place. ‘As it happens, I know a lot about Dartford warblers.’ He proceeds to tell us. My mind drifts. Not only have I never seen or heard of a Dartford warbler, but it sounds more like a criminal than a bird. (‘The Boston Strangler? No it’s the Dartford warbler wot done it.’)
I ask Lynne quietly how often the army uses the f
iring range. ‘All the working week and one weekend per month.’ Which leaves only about six days a month when the birds are not being potentially shelled. When we stop, I read the MOD notice guarding the range, which informs me that ‘projectile’ means any shot or shell or other missile or any portion thereof’, and that over much of what we’re looking at you’re liable to be bombarded by one. You can also be arrested without a warrant.
There are fires burning on the slopes where Lynne had hoped to show us the bustards. ‘In this dry weather the ordnance can set them off,’ she explains. I feel sorry for her. Andy’s face looks like that of a priest who has just heard confession. There is, unsurprisingly, not a single bustard to be seen. ‘Let’s go and have a look at the stone curlews instead,’ says Lynne brightly.
‘Is that a stone curlew over there?’ asks Andy, pointing to the distance.
‘No,’ says Lynne, with far less satisfaction than I would have brought to the answer: ‘That’s a calf. It’s just very far away, so it looks small.’
I leave them to it and begin the next stage of my walk across the Plain, skirting the firing grounds along the proposed Great Stones Way route to Avebury. It has yet to be approved by all the ‘stakeholders’, one of those horrible words like ‘gatekeepers’ that means those with the power to obstruct – in this case the MOD, various parish councils and the village of Avebury itself, which is curiously hesitant to attract walkers.
At the moment, without a trail to follow, hardly anyone comes up onto this area of Salisbury Plain. The work avoiding firing ranges is off-putting. Not a single garage or shop along the Avon Valley bothers to sell local maps, so few are the walkers who come to the heartland of Neolithic Britain.
It’s a shame, as the Plain has a bleak beauty along with its history. Just across from the great bustard release site is the biggest unexcavated tumulus in Britain; and back over the river lies the East Chisenbury midden, a monumental dumping ground for late Bronze Age artefacts which was recognised as such only in 1992 – it’s so large that it had always been mistaken for a hill. The find prompted an academic paper with one of my favourite titles, ‘East Chisenbury: ritual and rubbish’: it contains the sober assessment that, ‘in terms of scale, the midden dwarfs other contemporary sites; this is clearly an important pile of rubbish.’
Some way into the Plain I am passed by the only other person I see in this area, a smartly dressed, lone woman wearing Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses, who is heading determinedly towards the shooting area; the red flags are up to signify that it’s a ‘live’ day. I’m hesitant to approach her, as she has the very English air of someone minding their own business, but in an equally English way she seems pleased when I open a conversation; given we are the only two people in sight for miles around, it would be absurd to ignore each other.
In a Kensington and Chelsea accent, she tells me she regularly drives down from London to walk right inside the firing range, as it’s one of the few places ‘where you don’t run the risk of meeting anybody else’. I murmur that this might be because they worry they’ll get shot.
‘Oh, I love all that. It gets my endorphins going. I got back to the car once and found it ringed by military police. When I told them I just enjoyed the walking, they didn’t believe me. They said, “How can you possibly claim to enjoy walking when you don’t have a dog?”’
She strides away towards the red flags on the horizon. I suspect she won her last argument with the military police, and will again.
An old cattle drovers’ road leads me on from an isolated farm; the farmers here are paid an additional subsidy because of the disruption caused by the firing ranges. I always love the width of an old cattle track, particularly one like this which has become disused: the way its ruts attract the cow parsley; the unevenness of the grass across its ledges. Of course there is an intimacy to a small and narrow path – but there is also a propulsion that comes from feeling you are walking behind many herds of cattle that once came this way. The very name ‘Icknield Way’ may derive from ‘Ichen’, meaning ‘cattle’, according to the antiquarian John Aubrey; although it may also derive from ‘Iceni’, the tribe who lay at the end of the long trackway across England, in Norfolk.
A little later I come to the edge of the firing area at Casterley Camp, an Iron Age hill-fort that now adjoins a guardhouse. The soldier on duty looks at me warily, but like the woman wearing Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses, opportunities for conversation do not come along that often on Salisbury Plain and we get to talking. An older man, in his fifties, he tells me that at one time the army were in trouble for riding roughshod over some of the smaller tumuli and barrows with tanks, largely because local commanders didn’t know or care that they were there. With 2000 monuments listed over the Plain, this was not surprising. So they stuck large marker stakes in the middle of the tumuli; this only annoyed the archaeologists even more. Now they section them off completely.
We are looking back over the Plain. There are fires rising from some sections. ‘The ordnance can catch in this hot weather, particularly the small-arms and tracer fire,’ says the guard. He says it in the same neutral, observational way that Lynne had earlier, as if it were a perfectly natural human activity to bombard a hillside with material that may set it ablaze.
*
I’m lying on a mossed and tussocked mound that pillows out from Old Adam Hill at a perfect angle, allowing me to write and look back down south over the way I have come, from Salisbury Plain and the beautiful and isolated Vale of Pewsey. Somewhere just below me is a horse cut from the chalk, which, while I am now too close to see it, has been guiding me across the valley as I came. The heads of the wild grasses are waving in the wind and just catching the light in the same way that the white marks left by the seed driller are doing in the fields below.
This area of Pewsey is delightfully empty now – no major roads, not even a ‘designated long-distance footpath’, and little written about despite its beauty. As if to demonstrate the isolation, a young badger passes me in broad daylight, not ten feet away, and potters up the hill towards its sett.
The white horse carved on the hill below me is a later tribute to a prehistoric past. The horse has a prancing, kinetic energy, the tail lifted, which recalls those first images of horses on prehistoric British coins and the more famous white horse at Uffington.
A middle-aged woman passes me with hair down to her waist and a white parasol. She says she has been visiting all the four white horses close to Avebury and that they are placed at the cardinal points – surely, she muses, a deliberate act by a prehistoric society. I feel almost guilty telling her that, apart from Uffington, all the other white horses on the Downs – and there are nine of them – are much later creations, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and were cut as homages to the earlier ones.
To my mind this makes them almost as moving as the real thing – evidence of a continuity that stretches for thousands of years: the power and appeal of a moving horse on landscape and of ‘leucippotomy’, a wonderful word, the art of carving white horses in chalk upland areas. As artworks, the best of them – like this one on Old Adam Hill, one of the highest points in Wiltshire – are remarkable, for etching a horse as part of the landscape is very different from a drawing or a sculpture. The horse has to be seen from multiple vantage points; one or two of the less successful horses look as if they were done from a flat drawing and so are foreshortened when seen from below.
This particular chalk horse was designed in 1812 by a travelling painter called John Thorne, who was commissioned by a local farmer for the then princely sum of £20 both to draw and to cut it. Although he did the drawing, he absconded with the money before carving the horse; the farmer had to pay someone else to see his project finished. John Thorne was caught and found guilty of a series of crimes, for which he was hanged. The story would have been a gift to Thomas Hardy.
The parking spot at nearby Milk Hill is full of revellers heading for either Stonehenge or Avebury, in th
e days approaching the summer solstice, and the travelling community, the old hippies and the young ravers, are all making their way across country to an appropriate rendezvous.
A couple are flying a kite from the hill while, in a multicoloured rainbow van with a pop-up roof, eggs and bacon are being fried and the smell drifts over. I pass a wizened man with a beard, who had stripped to the waist, showing off his tattoos. Hunkered down on the step of a caravan beside his half-breed lurcher, he tells me many of the vans have been parked up for a few nights and have ‘settled in nicely’. We are far enough away from the traditional solstice trouble-spots for the Wiltshire Constabulary not to put in an appearance, and there is a good atmosphere building between the temporary inhabitants.
The only flashpoints are the dogs. I’ve noticed before that travellers take pride in giving their dogs considerable liberties; many a conversation between travellers exchanging astrological titbits or benign platitudes is rudely interrupted by their dogs having a go at each other.
As I stroll by one van, a bulldog of some mixed and mutinous disposition has a go at me with a snap at my legs that thankfully doesn’t quite connect. His purple-haired owner is apologetic: ‘Sorry love, Marley never normally does that. He’s a good dog really.’ It’s a line I suspect she uses often.
Eating my sandwiches and some of Mike’s boiled eggs, I overhear one family having a long discussion as to whether they should go to Stonehenge or Avebury for the solstice; where the police presence will be most oppressive or intrusive; and how to camp near by, given that so many restrictions are in place (English Heritage guidelines to attending the solstice at Stonehenge run to ten pages of detailed and petty rules).