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Despite ears damaged by the explosions of years of military ordnance, I’ve been re-learning different warbler birdsongs this spring, and sorting out my green-veined white butterflies from my small whites. This is not entirely for idle pleasure; I have recently taken up formal wildlife guiding for the first time, partly for the pleasure of it, and partly as an antidote to the weeks and months spent behind a screen that the writing of each book inevitably brings. It's a sort of gap year, but not.

When you publish a book, the feedback comes intermittently and with long delays; when you are standing in front of the people with whom you are directly communicating, you know instantly how the message is landing and, besides, all of nature is on hand to help you make and reinforce your point. And you need to know your stuff, because the problem with wildlife guiding is that people tend to ask awkward questions.

If only, I sometimes think, if only I could guide them within my own heartland.

The Holly Walk

A few hundred yards north of our village, there is a wood on the north facing escarpment of the ridge that we call home. About a third of the way down that escarpment, a well-made path contours its way, just under a mile, through the wood from the old folly at one end to 'the big house' at the other. A century or two ago, it was used for moving quarried sandstone to the nearest point on the London road. Now it is just used by locals like us, walking our dogs, and by visitors out for a bit of nature. Its principal architecture is provided by mature Beech trees, punctuated by the oak, sycamore, chestnut and the odd giant holly, through the gaps in whose combined canopies you can glimpse the fields and woods of the North Downs, and the ever-changing skyscapes. For all but a fifth of my years, I have known it with the visceral knowledge that transcends ever having to really think that much about it. I could walk, and have walked, through it blind-folded.

As a boy, I was fully in awe of it, as we generally all are with the concept of the wild wood beyond. Maybe I was scared of what lurked in the shadows behind the enormous beech trees that act as its presiding architecture. It took me a good few years to go there on my own and, at first, I would only do so to publicly demonstrate courage and at breakneck speed, the better to be out the other end before the wild things got me.

As I got older, so the wood became first my friend, and then my confidante and finally something like a proxy brother. I hid for teenage hours in its sparse understory, and gradually learned that stillness, patience and silence would eventually be rewarded by the chance to closely observe another’s life: a fox slinking by, maybe, or an autumn jay hiding an acorn a yard or two from my own boots. It is where I slowly rediscovered the awe that I was born with, that we are all born with, that childlike sense of wonder that science and busy lives have sought to remove from us.

Decades later, I watched my own children taking their first tentative steps along and then away from the path, first together and then alone, and off into the bracken of the common land above or the bluebell woods below. Just as my sister and I gave different trees and corners names from the books that we read, so my own boys pillaged Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to do the same thing. Sometimes the temporary names stuck and jumped generations for no discernible reason: the Kitchen Tree; the Porridge Tree. The physical wood is someone else’s, but the echoes and memories within it are ours.

When my wife and I walk there together, we might talk, or more often we might just walk on in companionable silence until one of us spots something out of context, a strange fungus perhaps, or if one of us has something to say. Most of the time there is enough conversation and activity going on above our heads, alongside us and below our feet for us not to need to add anything.

A cathedral of birdsong

No two hours there are the same, let alone two days, as each un-named season bleeds gradually and seamlessly into the next. Spring dawns like these are when the birdsong echoes raucously round the cathedral arches of the canopy, filling the space with illogical loudness from largely invisible bodies, maybe accompanied by the machine gun hammering of some nearby woodpecker. This morning, I happened to be late, and it was the mewing of a pair of buzzards high above, and the barking of an unwelcome muntjac down in the marshy bit below me to my north. I noticed that the path has recently become full of little badger latrines and of their owner’s shuffling trackways of a new boar as he worked his moonlit way across the path in search of who knows what. Yesterday, it was a lone, unseen treecreeper; the day before, a croaking raven high overhead, the yaffle of a green woodpecker and the bark of a farm dog many fields away.

It was here, a couple of years ago, that I first saw my first ever Sussex goshawk, his and my paths crossing at close quarters for one thrilling, chilling second before he ghosted swiftly out of my sight. A few days later, I followed the pigeon feathers and found his regular plucking post, a rotted stump from the 1987 hurricane, together with a place that I could watch from; every five or six days, another woodpigeon. He’s gone now, but he’ll be back, and after him the pine marten in all probability.

(When the 1987 hurricane blew through, the devastation was at such a pitch that the locals wondered if it could ever be the same again. The answer was 'no', but not in the way we thought it. Because it was impossible to extract all the fallen timber before it had rotted where it was on the ground, it is now far, far more diverse and richer than it ever was, a haven for invertebrates, fungi and birds, as well as a provider of that kind of untamed beauty that comes from natural disorder.)

The strange importance of walking in the dark

Some of the most magical times for me there have been at night, where that delicious frisson of fear that the dark exposes in all of us dovetails neatly with the excitement of being in someone else's private world. It is when the interplay of adult and child within me is at its most beguiling, when my soldier’s logic asserts that I am as safe as can be, but some deep evolutionary memory insists that maybe, just maybe, the encircling dark harbours some danger that I haven’t even considered. Once, when I was wandering around in the snow at two in the morning after some errant terrier stuck down a rabbit hole, I slipped down a bank and ended up momentarily alongside a roe doe curled up in uneasy sleep. For a split second we looked into each other's eyes, before she was up and away into the night in three silent bounds. I could no more be bored here than leave the planet.

Heartland

These days, if I'm at home, I walk it at dawn and dusk every day, sometimes more, normally east to west but sometimes the other way simply to change the perspective and ring the changes. I have probably walked over 15,000 miles, some 30 million paces, through it since we moved back here 30 years ago, that's half way around the Earth on just one local path. It is during those miles that almost every significant creative thought has come to me, almost always by accident more than design, including the ideas for four out of the six nature books I have written; it is to that path that I go, without fail, if I need to work something out for myself, or to understand better something that is troubling me; and it is from that path that the seeds of each day' 's activities tend to get watered and grow. If I have a heartland, this is it. If I had ever become rich and famous enough to be on Desert Island Discs, the soundtrack of this wood at springtime would have been the eighth record, the one that I would have saved when all the others were washed away.

Of course, my heartland is no more important to me than yours is to you, and there are plenty of places out there with more immediate beauty, more drama and more underlying biodiversity than my hilside path. But that's not the point. These places are simply the familiar yardsticks by which we can try to make sense of all the other places that we might go to and try to understand, but they are no less vital for all that. They are the unshifting baseline on whose safe surface we can take stock of everything else.

These heartlands are, for all of us, the places where we can watch narrowly, and be narrowly watched, for ever.

By Roger Morgan-Grenville

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