I walked back to the camper van parked snugly under the trees, the orange glow of Dave’s culinary activities seeping out through the windows like a lantern in the night. Tonight we would eat pasta and play Bananagrams, and there the cuckoo would be, lingering in the woodland just a few metres down from where we would later fall asleep. Even then he called out to the darkness; an endless chime; a hook to catch hold of my soul and lift me into spring.
On our final night in France we slept by the beach at Normandy, the sand scattered with shells and cuttlefish bones, the odd bottle top and bits of dried bladderwrack infused with salt. A low tide and a low sun; to the west the sky was stained like blood, a marbled canvas of tangerine, crimson, electric purple. The waves washed into the shore and returned to the sea, and at the water’s edge a gang of wading birds shuffled through the sediment, jabbing at the ground in search of small things to eat.
I thought we might be standing on one of the D-Day beaches, and imagined the horrors of what had happened below my feet; of who had lived, who had died, and who had fought to rid Europe of a darkness greater than anything found in the natural world. Like many people my age, I don’t agree with war as a solution to the world’s problems. It belongs in the past; a primitive, reactive step that indulges our basest instincts and disregards all of the intellectual progress we have made as a species. How can conflicts be resolved through violence? It’s a strange idea, although I am, of course, clueless to what the alternative is. I’m not an anthropologist or a politician or a sociologist; I have no idea how best to deal with terrorists or poverty or any of the causes for modern warfare today. But I believe that most conflicts are rooted in greed and fear; we are conditioned to expect a high standard of living with lots of material goods, and rather than sharing that with others, we are fed scaremongering tales by the media that encourage us to see other people as ‘enemies’, when in actual fact they are just trying to survive in the best way they think possible. Sometimes their way of doing things will clash with our own morality, but how can violence be a sustainable way to stop such complex problems? The real answer to conflict has perhaps not revealed itself yet, but in some intricate, long-term way, it must surely be rooted in love and understanding rather than in hate and ignorance.
We stayed awake long into the night, watching the waves roll up the beach and back out to the ocean, out towards England and the south coast where we lived just a few kilometres away. That night we drank bottles of French dry cider effervescing with the aroma of apple blossom and autumn sun, and on the side we ate a slobbering slab of pungent cheese found in a nearby delicatessen. It would be the last piece of cheese we would eat, as we had decided that the next day we would finally commit to something we had thought about for a long time: going vegan.
France seemed an appropriate place to say farewell to dairy, and what a final feast! A creamy, semi-soft hunk that had half-melted in the heat, encased in a washed rind and stinking to high heaven. An absolute dream for a cheese fiend, which I had been ever since working on the Waitrose cheese counter when I was 16. It was cheese, in fact, that had prevented me from committing to veganism for so long. I had turned vegetarian around five years ago for purely environmental reasons, but over the years I learned more and more about the relationship between agriculture, people and the earth. Meat had been easy to give up, and although I loved eggs, I thought they would be easy too. But cheese was my favourite food group – the fouler-smelling, the better. I was still determined to have a taste of casu marzu, the traditional Sardinian sheep’s cheese that contains real living maggots – a delicacy so far removed from modern health-and-safety standards that it has been banned by the EU and is now only available on the Italian black market.
One evening I read a book about the evolution of the human species and how we first domesticated animals, and it was then that I decided I wanted to finally give up eggs and dairy. The fact that I am alive on this planet, that a certain selection of atoms formed together to give me 100 years of life and joy and love on earth, made me realise that it was impossible for me to take that away from another living thing with a clear conscience, even though domesticated animals were tamed by humans in the first place. I could no longer mourn the loss of wildlife, the catastrophe of climate change, the suffering of other animals, the ecological state of the world, and still cling to bad habits as if they were impossible to change. To know I am reducing my demand on the earth and not exploiting other living things has changed the way I connect with the natural world, and I feel lighter for it, more healthy, more free, more at peace with the world around me.
We dined on cider, artichokes (after seeing them for sale everywhere, we discovered Brittany was famous for them) and our last scoops of soft, French cheese, until the sun disappeared behind the sea and, with the sound of waves lapping against the shore, we fell asleep in the twilight.
My hometown sits just off the border of Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey, and a few kilometres down the road from Iping Common, a beautiful, buzzing heathland filled with bees and flowers and rare, wild things. It was the place I brought Dave during our first summer together, when I was desperate to show him one of my favourite natural events of the year, one that lasts only as long as the nights stay short and warm; by early September it would be finished, and with it the vibrancy of summer.
We drove to the edge of the forest and left the car by the road. It was already 11pm and the sun had set, casting a faint glow across one corner of the sky, blurring into midnight black at the other. Here, empty of clouds, the shadows of space were interrupted by tiny stars and a crescent moon glowing cream in the darkness. We walked from the car into the trees, following a dirt path that wound through the woods in the shade, until after several minutes we emerged into a heathland, the air alive with that arid warmth of bees on heather flowers, rusty bracken crunching underfoot, invertebrates crawling across the dry earth.
There is nothing like a heathland at night, and it never surprises me that Shakespeare chose it as the setting for the Weird Sisters’ meeting place in his Scottish tragedy Macbeth – it’s an eerie, evocative place even in daylight. While we are fortunate enough to have 58,000 hectares of heathland in Britain, globally it is rarer than rainforest. In the last two centuries we have lost so much that only 16 per cent remains of the heathland that once grew here; as the Industrial Revolution took hold, factory work became mechanised, cities grew, the countryside was ploughed up, fens drained, trees uprooted, and heathland – also known as the common land – was enclosed. What had once been, quite literally, common land for communities to graze their livestock on and forage firewood, became enclosed in one larger plot of land owned by whoever could afford to buy it. This landlord then controlled how the land was used and, although yields and profits increased, many people felt it signalled the end of the communal countryside. Tenants were no longer able to graze upon the land unless permission was granted, and many poorer people were forced to leave the countryside for factory work in the cities.
Yet, despite the loss, in a strange way we have almost come full circle with our heathlands, as much of the land that was sold off years ago has fallen back into the hands of organisations like the National Trust and Wildlife Trusts, who are nurturing and maintaining them for future generations. Our heathlands are now the product of thousands of years of partnership between humans and their grazing animals, characterised by heather, gorse, fine grasses, wildflowers and lichens. The autumn before, I had met rangers in the New Forest who were removing invasive pine seedlings that, if left alone, would seed out into precious wetland areas and dry them out. The rangers were also cutting down gorse shrubs that had grown so large their value to wildlife was lessened. The pines and gorse were then burned on a controlled fire to destroy the remains. Small sections of the heathland would also be burned later in the season to revitalise the ground and promote new growth.
The rangers worked on a rotation throughout the area to create a mosaic of heathland scrub at various stages of m
aturity, ensuring a diverse habitat for the abundance of wildlife that found a home in the New Forest. Unlike trees, heathland can’t regenerate naturally, so it needed the extra help or it would just revert to species-poor woodland. They used almost exactly the same techniques that had been employed for centuries, and this was done over the winter months to avoid disturbing wildlife like the ground-nesting nightjars. The larger, older shrubs made great perches for birds like the stonechat and Dartford warbler, while young heather flowers attracted the rare silver-studded blue butterfly.
Another part of managing such a diverse habitat is the use of grazing livestock. The New Forest is famous for its curious ponies, greeting visitors and eating windfall apples left out by residents, but you can also find cattle, sheep, donkeys and even pigs roaming through the trees. The variety of livestock means they each graze on different plants in different ways, ensuring the mosaic of habitats continues to flourish. Pigs are released each autumn for ‘pannage’, a local tradition mentioned in the Domesday Book whereby the pigs are encouraged to eat fallen acorns, chestnuts and beechmasts, which are poisonous to the ponies.
Being such an ancient and intricate fusion of human and natural history, heathlands have been used for centuries as a backdrop for myths and stories. Perhaps the most famous heathland tales of all are those of the Brontë sisters, set against the desolate landscape of the Yorkshire Moors and full of dark twists and doomed romances that many believe capture the hostile beauty of the heath. Authors of classic novels Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë captured the soul of the moorland in their evocative descriptions of their stories’ setting. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw lies in her sickbed, but longs to be outside in nature, where she feels she belongs:
‘Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free … and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills. Open the window again wide: fasten it open!’
When she is finally laid to rest, she is not buried in a grave, but on a green slope in a corner of the churchyard, ‘where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor’.
Iping Common was managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust, and tonight we had come to listen to the nightjars calling in the dark. I’d been here once before, on a guided walk with the Trust when we listened to nightjars and owls, found bats using echolocation receivers, and learned all about the Bronze Age barrows and burial mounds scattered throughout the reserve. I remembered the route to the centre of the heath, but then we trailed off in search of birds and bats, following a line of trees that ran down one edge of the reserve and into a thick cluster of dark woodland. From here we wound through the trees, got lost, spooked each other and returned to the heathland once more. And there, at last, we caught a sound on the air that stopped us in our tracks, holding our breath as we strained to hear what was emerging from the black night.
It is difficult to describe the call of a nightjar without using the perfectly defined word ‘churr’, a mechanical, gyrating gurgle that falls between two notes; an eerie call that has perhaps contributed to the nightjar’s mysterious reputation. The churring call contains around 1,900 notes per minute, and although it sounds like the bird is calling in two different tones, the ventriloquial manner of its shift from high to low is actually just the nightjar turning his head to project in a different direction. When the churring stops altogether, he is most likely on the move; after a bubbling trill combined with a sharp wing clap, the nightjar has leapt into flight.
With beautiful feather patterns of dead leaves and tree bark, it is almost impossible to find a nightjar in daylight. They are ground-nesting birds, and in order to survive they remain motionless, undetected due to their amazing camouflage against the peaches and browns of heather and bracken. They are so protective of their young that they will even move the entire nest further away if disturbed. A man called Jonnie I once met in the Haslemere Bookshop told me that he had been searching for nightjars with a BTO nest recorder in Surrey, and it was their job to attach a piece of coloured wool to any nests they found so that when the recorder came to write down the location, he would be able to find it more easily. They followed the instructions carefully and secured the wool to the nests, but afterwards the recorder kept complaining that the wool was nowhere near the nests and he’d had to spend ages searching for it nearby. After some investigation, they discovered the nightjar was so outraged at being disturbed by the nest recorders, it had actually rolled each one of its eggs to a new area and rebuilt the nest around them there.
Dave and I stood listening to the bird churring on the air, unsure from which direction it was coming. Like my Finnish woodpecker, the sound seemed to reverberate around the trees and sky so that it was almost impossible to locate the source, especially when we were surrounded by darkness. We moved vaguely towards the direction of the sound, creeping over bracken and moss, desperate not to make too much noise in case the call stopped and that dreaded wing clap signalled his relocation to a new perch. Despite their elusive nature in the daylight, at night they are known to fly close to the heads of those who dare to invade their territory, and I later learned that flashing a piece of white fabric, resembling the white patches on the wings of the male, could be a good way to draw them closer to you.
The nightjar continued to churr from left to right, and we moved closer and closer … until suddenly it stopped. Damn! Unless it happened to fly in our direction it would be difficult to relocate until it started churring again. We waited, breathing slowly and quietly, until a wing clap broke across the moor. As we squinted through the darkness above us, just where the black forest ended and the deep blue of the sky began, a shadow appeared: swift-shaped but large and determined, it rose up in a crescent moon and soared over the trees before disappearing into the darkness once more.
Delighted to have seen my first nightjar in the wild – silhouettes do count – we waited once again for the nightjar to begin his call across the hidden landscape of the heath. We didn’t have to wait long: somewhere in the darkness to the left, the same sound soon emerged from the trees and floated over on the air, enticing us in like a hypnotist’s pendulum.
For a while we continued walking through the heathland, following the sound of the nightjar under the dark sky, bats flying over our heads. Eventually we decided to start heading home, but on the way back we discovered one of my favourite nocturnal species, a tiny creature in the grass beside the path.
Glow-worms are not technically worms, but beetles, with the females glowing greeny-orange on warm summer nights to attract a mate in their grassland habitats. In order to be seen by their male seducers’ photosensitive eyes, they clamber up plant stems to cause their light to spread out as far as possible, like a tiny beacon. I’ve never stumbled upon one in the day – or, if I have, I don’t think I’d know it; they are typical beetles, light brown in colour, while the larvae have grey and yellow triangular markings along their bodies, and to find one in daylight would be a small miracle. It’s the adult female that gives them their name and reputation, an orb of green suspended in the grass, swaying under the light of the stars.
We stayed and watched the glow-worm for a few minutes, all the while listening to the churr of the nightjar now behind us on the moor. In winter this place would have been frightening – a cold and desolate moorland forest – but in the summer the air was mild, the sky glowing, the wind vibrating with the bird that, for me, had become so closely associated with long days and short nights. We could hear insects moving through the heather flowers, murmurings in the trees and shrubs, the sound of creatures alive in the dark. At last, we left Iping Common and walked back to the car for the short drive home, a warm breeze on our necks and the juddering call of the nightjar following us through the
night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Dart
In the summer of 2017, my friend Viv and I travelled to Rotherfield Peppard in the Chilterns, to take part in a coracle-building workshop with Alistair Phillips, possibly one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I had recently developed an obsession with trying out heritage crafts; that year I had also learned to carve a wooden spoon and to forge iron with our blacksmith, so when Viv suggested we build our own coracles, I was more than keen. Also known as a currach, bull boat, quffa or parasil, the coracle is a small boat dating back thousands of years, found in cave paintings from the early Bronze Age but possibly going right back to the Ice Age. I’d seen them before at the farm, where our archaeologist had been building them the traditional way out of waterproof cow hides, animal-hair ropework and locally foraged wood and pitch. But as we actually wanted ours to last and nobody was too bothered about authenticity, we opted for a PVC lining over a woven frame of ash laths. The PVC would protect the coracle from snagging on rocks and ripping a hole in the bottom, which – assuming we managed not to sink – would usually be mendable with duct tape but still a hassle to sort out.
We spent a long day in the sunshine in the balmy warmth of Alistair’s garden, constructing our coracles beside chaffinches gobbling up damselflies and red kites soaring over our heads – the house was only 10km from the original holding pens of the kites’ successful conservation programme in the 1980s. By the end of the day, we had built our vessels and completed a lesson in using the paddle and sitting correctly so we didn’t fall in, and we finished with a float through a lagoon close by, willow leaves trailing in the water, sunlight dancing through the air. It was heaven, and after we said goodbye, Viv drove us back to the farm to store the coracles in one of the tech pods. Since then they have been allowed to stay there in storage, although whenever I go to collect mine it has usually been moved to where it’s not in the way. More often than not it’s in the roof rafters of the pig palace and I am required to somehow transport a coracle out of a building full of excitable, nibbling piglets.
Dark Skies Page 19