At the bottom of one of the slopes, there’s an old farm with a charmingly creaky livery where we keep Dave’s mum’s New Forest pony, Sparkle (although she was recently measured and has now grown so tall she isn’t classed as a pony, but a New Forest horse). The livery is home to several horses and their owners, who gather each day to muck out, gossip, hack out into the Hangers and drink coffee in the sunshine. There’s an orange cat called Vincent who sleeps on the hay pile, and a leucistic blackbird that’s been nesting there for three years in a pile of old tyres behind the school. Leucism is a condition where partial loss of pigmentation causes an animal to have white patches on their skin, feathers or scales, which meant that our blackbird looked like he’s been splashed with bleach. Despite this, it had evidently not impeded his ability to survive, and he had become so tame that as soon a wheelbarrow of horse dung was tipped into the manure box, there he’d be, hopping through the pile and picking out the insects for breakfast.
Our livery is a far cry from that demographic of the equestrian world where, despite a shared love of horses, the owners can appear somewhat snooty. These are the people who have given horse-riding a bad name, associating it with wealth and class, as something that only the most affluent members of society can enjoy. While it’s undeniable that owning a horse and having lessons is expensive, there are ways to manage it – through sharing, making friends, or simply helping out with the chores. We were so lucky to have found this livery for Sparkle because everyone here was not only kind and helpful, but there was no expectation of what an equestrian should be. As long as everyone cared for their horse’s welfare, it didn’t matter whether you were a national dressage champion or you simply liked trotting out into the woods once a week. We were all connected by a love of horses and a love for the beautiful countryside around us.
One evening we were riding back from a long hack into the Hangers, through the beech forests, along the chalky ridge and up to Cobbett’s View, so named after the English farmer and journalist who loved to explore Hampshire and Surrey on horseback. In his 1830 book Rural Rides, he wrote of the place now known as Cobbett’s View, a clearing emerging from the woodland that overlooks the rolling Downs from one of the highest points of the Hangers:
These hangers are woods on the sides of very steep hills. The trees and underwood hang, in some sort, to the ground, instead of standing on it. Hence these places are called Hangers … Out we came, all in a moment, at the very edge of the hanger! And never, in all my life, was I so surprised and so delighted! I pulled up my horse, and sat and looked; and it was like looking from the top of a castle down into the sea.
If we had carried on riding that evening, we could have taken the Hangers Way, a 34km route from Petersfield to Alton that follows the undulating hills and valleys of East Hampshire. We could have taken the horses through the village of Hawkley, home to the Hawkley Inn where we spent many long summer afternoons and cosy winter nights, and along to Selborne where Gilbert White’s taxidermy nightjar sat on the parlour mantelpiece. As it was, our horses wouldn’t fare well in the dwindling light; Sparkle was bright but frisky, while Hugo, the lovely boy I was riding, was more sturdy but could still be spooked if he lost his nerve. We were heading home before the full velvet night fell upon us, and through the gaps in the beech leaves we could see the sky turning from blue to grey before beginning its descent into faded mauve, when the stars would start emerging like ivory pinpricks.
The air was bursting with the aroma of wild roses, which had tangled themselves into the hedgerow and would later ripen into rose hips, full of nutrients that would keep the birds and mice fed in winter. The world looks different on horseback; we are so used to seeing everything from a metre or two off the ground, but when you are raised up onto a horse a familiar setting is suddenly seen from a new perspective. Instead of your eyes falling on bluebells or cow parsley, the bustling foliage of the hedgerows and forest floor, you are forced to look upwards, into the canopy or out towards the views that are hidden from sight when walking on foot. The South Downs is so diverse in its habitats, so undulating with its high peaks and shadowed valleys, that even looking at it from a couple of metres higher in the air can transform it into a new space.
A similar transformation was happening that night as we walked through Petersfield to the edge of town and over to a green tunnel that led away through a row of houses and into the Hangers. I had never been this way before, but Dave took us through in complete darkness, our steps faintly illuminated by the light of a lately full moon shining through the trees. I was glad to be wearing leggings because the tunnel had been left to grow wild with nettles that brushed against my hands and left a sharp, white lump on my thumb. As we emerged into clearings between the trees, the moonlight revealed the way ahead, so we could see the end of the tunnel before us and the smooth surface of a deserted byroad.
We left the clearing and walked out onto the road, which was lit by a single lamp post glowing feverishly against the black sky. It was only due to the lamp post that we saw the bat. We could hear it rushing past our heads every few minutes in search of insects, but we could only see it when it flashed past the light, a tiny body hurling itself at lightning speed with intricate precision. We watched it for a while, moving up and down the road, and I tested out my rarely used flash-photography skills, managing to capture the bat in motion once or twice before I felt guilty for the disturbance and stopped. On the camera’s screen we could see the bat, minuscule and insignificant against the starlit sky, the flash turning it silver, and any elegance it had in motion lost to the unnatural stillness of the photograph.
At last, we left the bat in peace and continued our walk, leaving the boundaries of Petersfield and entering the sleepy beauty of Steep, where we passed the church where my sister got married, and the beautiful, sheep-strewn grounds of Bedales School where my mum worked, described by Tatler as ‘a bohemian idyll with bite’. We had entered Edward Thomas country, a poet so celebrated in our town that he had his own commemorative Poet Stone placed at the top of the Hangers by the poet Walter de la Mare. It had been there since 1937, when the hill, known as the Shoulder of Mutton, had been dedicated to Thomas 20 years after he was killed in action during the Battle of Arras on the Western Front. It was made of sarsen stone, the same material as the monoliths used to create the mysterious Stonehenge, and the Poet Stone had since become a source of local pride as well as an extremely exhausting hillside to climb.
Born in Lambeth and educated at Oxford’s Lincoln College, Edward Thomas worked first as a book reviewer, biographer and literary critic, before moving to Steep in 1906 with his wife and three children. With the encouragement of American poet and friend Robert Frost, he began writing poetry late in 1914, and in the two years that followed he completed around 140 poems before his early death in the First World War. His work had left a lasting mark on Petersfield and the surrounding area, and Thomas returned the affection while he was alive. One of our favourite local pubs, the White Horse, is known to most as ‘The Pub with No Name’ due to the fact that the wooden signboard is missing, leaving only a metal frame. Few stop to question what happened to it, but the answer can be found in one of Edward Thomas’ poems, ‘Up in the Wind’, where the barmaid relates how the sign used to blow about in the wind, driving her mad until it was supposedly stolen by a thief one night and never replaced:
‘Did you ever see
Our signboard?’ No. The post and empty frame
I knew. Without them I could not have guessed
The low grey house and its one stack under trees
Was not a hermitage but a public-house.
‘But can that empty frame be any use?
Now I should like to see a good white horse
Galloping on one side, being painted on the other.’
‘But would you like to hear it swing all night
And all day? All I ever had to thank
The wind for was for blowing the sign down.
Time after ti
me it blew down and I could sleep.
At last they fixed it, and it took a thief
To move it, and we’ve never had another:
It’s lying at the bottom of our pond.’
The poet Ted Hughes called him ‘the father of all’, and in death Edward Thomas has become one of Britain’s finest voices on war and nature, often utilising the cyclical rawness of nature to reflect on the realities of the battlefield, or simply bottling the tranquillity of the South Downs in a handful of words. Many critics believe he expressed a modern recognition of our place as humans within the natural world, and how closely we are connected; how much we rely on nature for our own wellbeing, and how we are not separate or superior to it, but interdependent. For him, the landscape was a constant in a life plagued by depression, with nature providing such a restorative power for him that he pledged to live a pastoral life, here in the foothills of the Hangers, in:
A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:
A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun.
It was ‘the Rising Sun’ that had caused our early-morning ramble through the wilds of Hampshire. Dave and I were both born and raised in Petersfield and had visited the Poet Stone on many different occasions, but neither of us had ever been there to see the sun rise over the Downs. As the weather was so hot and the nights so beautiful, we decided to make use of the July heatwave and walk the 5km to the Shoulder of Mutton in time for dawn, to watch the sun, listen to the birds and be back home again in time for breakfast.
It was Thomas, again, who had given us the idea. Together with his friend Robert Frost, who described Thomas as ‘the only brother I ever had’, he would regularly walk the Downs long into the night, years before either man made their success as a poet. They would discuss everything a great friendship usually involves, from marriage and war to poetry and wildlife, and it was during one of these night walks that the two men made the greatest decision of their lives. Thomas had been plagued by indecision on whether to join the war effort, despite being anti-nationalist and despising the racism stoked by the press, encouraging everyone to hate German civilians and feed their patriotism with rage. When Frost announced that he would be moving back to America rather than signing up to the war, Thomas had to decide whether to join him there with his family or to join the soldiers in France. The decision process was a long and complex one, but his writing suggests that one particular night walk in the summer of 1914 pushed him further towards fighting in France, when he wrote in his notebook about how he had imagined his countrymen fighting under the same moon as they were now standing:
A sky of dark rough horizontal masses in N.W. with a ⅓ moon bright and almost orange low down clear of cloud and I thought of men east-ward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up to now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it.
Not only did he feel guilty for not sharing the soldiers’ burden, but he also realised that he could no longer remain here in the sanctuary provided for him by nature while the existence of that sanctuary was threatened by the consequences of losing the war. His decision was later cemented by another poem written by Frost, although it was never Frost’s intention to send his friend to war. Amused by Thomas’ inability to make decisions, he chided him in a poem that is now one of his best known, ‘The Road Not Taken’, celebrated for both championing the freedom to choose our own path and highlighting the fact that we can never know how our choices affect our lives, as it is not possible to know what could have been. Often when out exploring together, Thomas would dwell on what might have happened if they had gone one way and not the other, sighing over what they might have seen and done. Frost pointed out to his friend: ‘No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another’, before sending him this poem two months before he died in battle:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
When I first learned about the history behind this poem, I couldn’t help pitying Thomas, which isn’t something I generally like to do. But if this is a true reflection of the torment he felt with every decision, the regret that consumed him with every choice he made, how much of his life must he have spent thinking of what could have been rather than what was?
As we walked through the Hangers that night, I thought back to autumn and how I had felt so sure that ending my relationship with Dave had been the right thing to do. I was so frustrated, so certain that I was freeing myself from something I didn’t want. Now I was back here, walking beside him through the half-light of early morning, and I wondered whether I would change what had happened if I could. Would I tell my past self that I was making a mistake and reassure her that I would be happier staying as we were? No. To quote the most clichéd truth in the dictionary of human discourse, everything happens for a reason; if I had never left Dave, how would I have known what it was like to be apart? Those three months were the most miserable of my life, but if I hadn’t experienced them, how would I know how I truly felt? There is no point dwelling on what could have been; I should only focus on what has happened – harvest it, digest it, and use it to continue with my sole purpose on earth: to be happy and free. I refused, however, to only associate Edward Thomas with pity because in every other way he was one of my greatest inspirations, sharing my love for the natural world and acknowledging our place within it. To walk through the same green lanes and hillsides was to step back in time and see the world through his eyes, forgetting there were 100 years between us.
As Dave and I wandered through Steep and finally climbed into the woodlands that lay at the bottom of the Shoulder of Mutton, away from the village and into the wilder realm of the Hangers, we realised it was four o’clock and almost time for the sunrise. With a brisker step we continued our way up towards the hillside, and started to listen out for the other natural wonder we had hoped to experience that morning – one that goes hand in hand with both the rising and setting of the sun. We listened to the stillness in the trees as we walked, the pause between one day and the next, between the past and the undecided future. It was silent, but we knew it wouldn’t be for much longer.
The dawn chorus is one of nature’s most powerful and captivating spectacles. From four o’clock onwards our gardens, hedgerows and woodlands erupt into a cacophony of song as every male bird attempts to seduce a partner with the greatest opera of their little lives. They time their breeding season to coincide with the warmest part of the year, when food is plentiful and any eggs laid will have a greater chance of survival, but we knew they would also be singing in July, perhaps with less vigour but with just as much heart. This early in the day there was less background noise from the human world, the air was of a different quality and could carry birdsong up to 20 times furt
her. It was still too early for the birds, but our ears were pricked for the first song, waiting for it to emerge from the forest any second. We dipped into a dark patch of woodland where we could hear a soft rustling in the trees, the first stirrings of the morning before the wild world awoke. From here we came to a gap in the trees before emerging onto the side of a deep crevice cut into the land, stretching out from left to right and smoothed over with black tarmac. It was the A3 – a hectic slice of road that wound from London to Portsmouth, historically maintained as a strategically important road to connect the capital city with the main port of the Royal Navy. Despite its heavy use, the majority of the road is only a dual carriageway rather than a motorway, shaped over the centuries to bypass market towns like ours and to create a smooth route for transportation across the south-east.
In recent years, developers have been praised for the construction of the Hindhead Tunnel a few kilometres along from Petersfield, not only reducing bottleneck traffic in the middle of a tiny town, but also diverting traffic underground and away from where the road previously skirted the wildlife-rich woodlands and heathlands of the Devil’s Punchbowl. The Punchbowl is a natural amphitheatre and nature reserve overlooking the tumbling Surrey landscape. The origins of its name are numerous, but one story tells how the Devil hurled lumps of earth at the Norse god Thor to annoy him, and the hollow out of which the earth was scooped became the Punchbowl. It has become one of my go-to places to get lost, hiking through the forests and streams hidden in the depths of the Punchbowl itself, and since the tunnel was built, populations of Dartford warblers, woodlarks and nightjars have thrived there. But my favourite corner of the Punchbowl is now the carpet of short grass that stretches in a crescent around the bowl – the small stub of land that is all that remains of the old A3 road. I love to imagine the travellers and traders who had galloped over that road for centuries, the highwaymen who stopped carriages in their tracks, the lovers eloping to faraway places, the soldiers and sailors who passed through on their way to great battles. Now the road had returned to nature, and nature was slowly nurturing it back to life. The edge of the road was bordered by gorse bushes and nettles, and butterflies settled on the short grass to feel the sun on their wings. There were no more cars, no more horses and carts – only the laced boots of hikers, the tyre tracks of cyclists, and the paws of foxes creeping across the reserve at night, listening to the churring call of the nightjar carried on the wind.
Dark Skies Page 22